Ortigas Foundation, Inc.

Present

Mapping the Mind

February 17 to 27, 2010

A week long event that will feature talks, workshops and exhibit related to art and history, environment and literature.

Pause, Unpause

A visual arts exhibit by artist Liza Flores

February 18 to March 17

Artists’ Nook

Creating a Climate for Change

An environmental talk

Speaker: Yeb Saño

Storytelling Session for Kids

By Adarna House

( for ages 5 to 9 years old )

 Alt+Pub : A Mini Forum on Alternative Publishing

Facilitated by Pinoypoets

A small tutorial and discussion on alternative publishing 

February 20, 2pm to 5pm

Edsa: Then and Now

A talk about the Edsa revolution in ’86  and the present fight for democracy

February 24, 6pm

High Chair Poetry Workshop

Facilitator:  Marc Gaba

February 27, March 6,13,20 & 27

for more details please contact Mabi David at 0917.4137393 or at mabidavid@yahoo.com

To register and for more information please call 631.1231 locals 222 and 228 or you may emai

Pinoypoets, in partnership with Fully Booked, invites everyone to "Poetry as Public Space," a lecture by 2006 Boston Poetry Prize Winner and visual artist Marc Gaba. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be held on January 24, Sunday, 2:00 PM at The Forum, 4th Floor, Fully Booked Bonifacio High Street. 

The last of a five-part series celebrating Pinoypoets' fifth anniversary, the talk is a lyrical exploration of the architectural in poetry, finding parallels between architecture, or the art of articulating spaces, and the creation of rhythms, distances, memory, and meaningful interactions in language.  It will also celebrate the launch of Gaba's chapbook Nouveau Bored in Fully Booked.

This event was organized with the support of High Chair and Filipinas Heritage Library.  Visit www.pinoypoets.com for details, or contact Pinoypoets through mail@pinoypoets.com or 0917-6934821 or 09166390640 for inquiries.

This is the second year that I have made a list.  

Noong 2009, sinumulan kong lagyan ng plano ang isang buong taon ko.  Mga plano na alam kong kaya kong gawin at maachieve, at 80% percent ng mga binalak ko ang natupad.  Maraming wala sa listahan ang nadagdag, at may mga nangyaring hindi ko halos namalayan.  May mga magandang nangyari, mga firsts, mga nakalulungkot, mga kakaiba, mga nakagugulat, at palaging may mga wala sa plano.  

This year, I will try to be more specific with my goals.  So specific that even the number of underwear I will buy is quantified.

A. To Buy

1. Digital Camera

Ngayon ko lang naramdaman ang need to have this gadget kaya ngayon ko lang binalak na magkaroon nito.  My budget for this is $6000.00 below.  Not too fancy, not too techie.

2. My own bank account

3. 12 New shirts

4. 12 New underwear

5. 5 New office slacks

6. 5 New maong pants

7. 2 New pair of shoes

8. A 200 piece capacity CD bag.

9. Computer speakers

B. To Do

1. Watch a movie is IMAX Theater.

2. Visit Star City or Enchanted Kingdom with friends

3. An out of town trip 

4. Reach out to old friends, and find a number of new ones.

5. Reduce my tummy.

6. Improve my memory

7. Update blog/journal regularly.

8. Improve my writing and communication skills especially in English.

9. Save 10-20% from monthly salary.

10. Monitor my cash flow.

11. Additional source of income.

C. To Accomplish

1. Pinoypoets's plans for 2010.

2. 15 Poems for the year (a finished collection).

3. To attend a National Writer’s Workshop

4. Publish poems.

5. Read 1 to 2 books in 2 weeks.

6. Improve my performance at work (QA and ACE Scores and Zero client escalation).

I know I am bound to repeat myself, but it just won't go away.  The bedside table is full of books: read, unread, and re-read for the umpteenth time.  The Angel of History Just won't go away...

The Angel of History

There are times when the child seems delicate, as if he had not yet crossed into the world. When French was the secret music of the street, the cafe, the train, my own receded and became intimacy and sleep. In the world it was the language of propaganda, the agreed-upon lie, and it bound me to itself, demanding of my life an explanation. When my son was born I became mortal.

Our days at Cape Enrage, a bleached shack of rented rooms and white air. April. At the low tide acres of light, boats abandoned by water. While sleeping, the child vanishes from his life.

Years later, on the boat from Beirut, or before the boat, an hour before, helicopters lifting a white veil of sea. A woman broken into many women.

These boats, forgotten, have no keels. So it is safe for them, and the emptiness beneath them safe.April was here briefly. The breakwater visible, the lighthouse, but no horizon. The music resembled April, the gulls, April, but you weren't walking toward this house. If the child knew words, if it weren't necessary for him to question me with his hands--To have known returning would be like this, that the sea light of April had been your vigilance.

In the night-vaulted corridors of the Hotel-Dieu, a sleepless woman pushes her stretcher along the corridors of the past. Bonjour, madame. Je m'appelle Ellie.

There were trains, and beneath them, laddered fields.

Autumns the fields were deliberately burned by a fire so harmless children ran through it making up a sort of game. Women beat the flames with brooms and blankets, so the fires were said to be under control.

As for the children, they were forbidden to ask about the years before they were born. Yet they burned the fields, yet everything was said to be under control with the single phrase death traffic.

This is Izieu during the war, Izieu and the neighboring village of Bregnier-Cordon. This is a farmhouse in Izieu, Itself a quiet place of stone houses over the Rhone, where between Aprils, forty-four children were hidden successfully for a year in view of the mountains. Until the fields were black and snow fell all night over the little plaque which does not mention that they were Jewish children hidden April to April in Izieu near Bregnier-Cordon.

Comment me vint l'‚criture? Comme un duvet d'oiseau sur ma vitre, en hiver. In every window a blank photograph of their internment.

Within the house, the silence of God. Forty-four bedrolls, forty-four metal cups. And the silence of God is God.

In Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in Les Milles, Les Tourelles, Moussac and Aubagne, the silence of God is God.

The children were taken to Poland.

The children were taken to Auschwitz in Poland singing Vous n'aurez pas L'Alsace et la Lorraine. In a farmhouse still standing in Izieu, le silence de Dieu est Dieu.

In the night-vaulted corridors of the Hotel-Dieu it is winter. If a city, ruin, if an animal, hunger. If a grave, anonymous. If a century, this.

Are the present hundred years a long time? But first see whether a hundred years can be present.

We lived in Ste. Monique ward over the main corridor, Ellie and myself, in the Hotel-Dieu on the Place du Parvis Notre Dame. Below us jonquils opened. Ellie was afflicted with scales again, tiny Ellie, at the edge of her bed, peeling her skin from her arm as if it were an opera glove, and weeping cachee, cachee, cachee all during the war.

Barn to barn in the haylight, field to cellar. Winter took one of her sons and her own attempt to silence him, the other.

Le Dieu? Le Dieu est un feu. A psychopath. Le Dieu est feu.

It isn't normal for a mother to outlive her children. It isn't normal that my sons should be dead.

Paris! Oh, how I loathe this city because of its past.

Then you wish to leave Paris?

Mais oui. I wish to leave life, my dear. My parents? Deported. My aunts and uncles? Deported. My friends? All of them deportees.I don't know what became of a single one. How they came to the end. My papers said I was Polish. When the money ran out, we ran. When the Nazis came, we ran. Cachee, cachee, cachee!

The tubercular man offers his cigarette and the snow falls, patiently, across the spring flowers.

My life, triste. Do you understand? This place. No good! France. No good! Germany. No good! Ni l'Union sovi‚tique. Fascists! It is no good.

Then why not leave Paris?

I am Jewish. Do you understand? Alone in a small room on the third floor, always alone . To remain sane, I sing librettos to myself, and German lullabies, can you imagine?

Mein Flugel ist zum Schwung bereit ich kehrte gern zuruck, denn bleib ich auch lebendige Zeit ich hatte wenig Gluck

My husband was a soldier against the Nazis. Resistance. Agir. He wasn't killed in the war. He even returned to me. It was after the war he died. He died of cholera. And the world is worse now than it was then.

Worse?

Mais oui!

We must wear our slippers and not smoke. We must not go further than the sign NO ADMITTANCE.

No- a little residue of nothing. And admittance, what does it mean? That they are not going to blame themselves for anything. But the deportees, no, there is nothing between the word and those who are not, who do not reviennent . And if language is an arbitrary system, one must not go further than the sign No Admittance in the H“tel-Dieu on the Place du Parvis Notre Dame.

Then my husband came with our child in his arms and stood outside Ste. Monique. They would not permit the child near my bed. A tuberculosis wing in winter. You go out then in the hallway, yes. You have the right to see your child. Don't let anyone stop you. They are all fascists.

A rain through raised windows, as in you must not forget anything: the hours, hope, sleeplessness, and the trains, you must not forgive them. Smoke rising from the fields, the death of a husband, winter's breath and the moonlight that reached the pallet. Hunger, and the knife of waking, the cold knife.

In April, the lilacs come, wrapped in Le Monde. "A plane went down in Warsaw this afternoon." There was time to imagine it: a wedding dress hanging in a toolshed outside Warsaw.

But when asked in what sense the world was worse, she answered Pardon, est-ce que je vous derange? Je ne sais pas trŠs bien m'‚xpliquer en fran‡ais.

Hotel-Dieu? Some people say so. I say this God is insane.

We held roses, then the roses rested on the snow as if someone had died there. Winter. There were many graves. All the same kind. So it would be a cemetery of war. . .

They died and were buried in mud but their hands protruded. So their friends used the hands to hang helmets on.

The foregoing is excerpted from The Angel of History by Carolyn Forche. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

Taken from:
http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060925840/The_Angel_of_History/excerpt.aspx

This is the ninth attempt...

Because i owe it to myself to keep on trying.  Because we owe it to ourselves to be always somewhere.  Calling out the zephyr of change.