Homecoming

By: Victoria G. Smith

 

Come back with me to where
cicadas smother the dusk
with their mating song, rousing
Dama de Noche from sleep to soak
the night air with her seduction.
There, the stars shine like watchful
eyes in labyrinthine onyx sky,
and the warm breeze caresses
like a lover’s fevered hands.
Do you remember how
we listened to the ocean
inside Neptune’s ears?
How I long to see the moon—a gold
medallion etched with Madonna and
Child, rising to jubilant arms of
coconut trees waving and singing,
“Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
There, I remember how the Goddess paints
a ribbon of magic upon gentle tides, paving
the shimmering path for sweethearts’ bancas
to kiss the waters with prayers of adoration.
I can hear the gitaras strumming
the melancholy notes of the haranas,
haunting the evening with serenades
of suitors forever yearning for lost loves.
How long before the exile returns
to the Birthland? Shall I live
the salmon’s fate—banished
to foreign waters, until death calls?
Alas, only time sweetened
by love’s memory has power
to build bridges burned
back to life.

Poet’s Notes. It’s summertime in the United States—time when many expatriate Filipinos return home to the Philippines for vacation. I have enjoyed this a few times myself. But this summer, I have to content myself with memories. I’m working on quite a few new writing projects: another poetry collection, a novella, and a novel.

The window before me is open; the view—of the hazy horizon, tainted by the smoke of the wildfires burning elsewhere, but near. On a clear day, I can see Monterey Bay and the Salinas Valley in a majestic symphony of sea, land, and sky. Like the ocean, islands, and sunny skies of my native Philippines. Today, I only have memory of it all.

A scent wafts in—the smoke from the Big Sur fires, undoubtedly. But today, it is mostly the memory of a distinctive, otherworldly, smoldering sweet-sour scent that tugs at my olfactory sense—the perfume of incense during the six-o-clock oración at the beautiful Holy Rosary Parish Church in my Philippine hometown where I’d spent many youthful years whispering my dreams and heartaches to the Mother of Perpetual Help.

At middle age, I have achieved many of those dreams, and since healed from many heartaches. Yet I still have some dreams left in me. And as one engages in the stuff of life, as one increasingly becomes impatient with the pettiness of this world, the shallowness and inauthenticity of friends, the vanity of almost everything and everyone—including myself, I know heartaches are not yet done with me either.

I am amazed at my resilience, and so I feel one with this land that is resilient to its twin demons of earthquakes and wildfires, whose beauty persists despite its challenges, today merely reflected in a different way in this different light of the smoke-kissed air—the light of gold-stained glass, like the stained glass windows of the church of my childhood.

The other day, I became nostalgic for another scent, too—the scent of the Dama de Noche flower in my native country. I remember it as the strong and seductive scent of expensive French perfume. How I’d love to inhale the perfume of this mysterious flower again—so mysterious it only blooms at night, reminding me that there are certain blossoms that especially thrive in the shadows. Like me. The Lady of the Night.

Elsewhere, in Washington D.C., people flocked to the botanical gardens to catch a glimpse and whiff of the Corpse Flower—a blossom that rarely blooms, so-called because of its own distinctive scent that a friend described as evocative of a dead rat. A scent of things to come in this presidential election year in the United States? I certainly hope not.

Shadows of smoke and fire, cleanse me. Shadows of memory, renew me. Shadows of my haunting dreams, wake me.

(All rights reserved. Copyright © 2016 by Victoria G. Smith. For updates on her author events & publications, go to VictoriaGSmith.com. “Like” her on Facebook at Author Victoria G. Smith. “Follow” her on Twitter