Poetics Poem by Edwin Cordevilla

The unseen is seen
In new light, and the seen
Is unseen, the shoulder conceals
What was known, it is a dream
Familiar, it is there and not there
Among the crowd, within the rush
Of blood, the pumping of the heart,
In the drumming. The wing hides
The other face of truth, and you swear
You have dreamt about it,
You swear you have heard its music,
Its voice, its own dream pressing
Against your skin, there only the eye
Mirroring, only the eye giving
The clue of what was visibly there,
And that is still there although unseen.
The same principle applies to the desert
Where grains of sand own and hide
Many of your stories, no wonder
You hear the sea in a shell
Because it remembers what is already hidden,
In metaphors you find memories
That remember you.

The true poet must be able to write
Even in the most impossible of circumstance
As poems happen anywhere everywhere,
The capturer of that essence needs
To shape-shift like water, to be liquid,
To mirror that condition, to be involved
And yet distant, to be within and without,
To be the experiencer and the documenter,
To be the opinion of eternity.

The true poet must be the meaning
And the meaning-maker, the utterance
And the speaker, he or she must be
Both master and servant of the word.

To capture the speed of light
In one’s palm and shape light into a word,
To give breath and voice,
To give flesh even and allow it to mingle
Among the crowd, and even with eyes closed
Pin-point its location in the great map
Of existence, order its direction
And to follow it as well,
To let it walk in and out of the page,
To make it dine with the gods
And converse with the damned.

The true poet needs to be the poet
Of poets, as a poem should be the threshold of consciousness,
It should also be the walker, the traveler,
As a poem is an adventure it must also be
The adventurer, this much the poet
Should perform through this sacred art of utterance,
This much the true poet must accomplish,
To be the angel and the envy of angels,
To be mortal and immortal,
To be able to capture the light of joy
In one’s palm and turn it into a word;
While allowing it to walk among the crowd,
To be able to say without saying,
To be able to untell without telling,
To be able to kill the assassin
With the precision of life,
To be able to give life
By daring and summoning death, the true poet
Has to perform these deeds
In the stillness of a room
Or amidst the chaos of desert war,
The true poet is the logic
Of the world’s survival,
From his or her pen flows
The truest essence of living.

The act of writing a poem is as sacred
As going and worshipping in a church,
For every single line in a poem
Is a triumph of the world’s humanity,
And every single poem victory for the human spirit,
It is therefore truth and fact
That poetry assures the universe of its integrity,
Despite the changing times poetry holds
Certain principles of existence that will never
Change till forever, as a petal reminds
The beholder that life performs her miracles
Even when no one’s looking
Or even when the one staring
Does not really see.

Such is poetry, she happens
Because she’s meant to happen,
She is deeply rooted in the tectonic
Plates of consciousness, and when she moves
How she moves, and on that train of history
The poet recites her, so that men and machine
Don’t miss the essence of their next stop.
How the heart that loves shall prevail over history,
How the soul that embodies living
Shall wield the grace that is kind to many.

Who creates the secret codes of the universe
And who is tasked to decipher them?
The poetic spirit bends metals
And explores universes far beyond the horizon
Of the naked eye. Reason follows its path,
Not the other way around. A single poetic
Utterance is always man’s first step
Over the moon, the Poetic advances
Civilization into the light of courage and knowledge,
Deeper into the unknown, deeper into
The tunnel of spiritual metaphors and eventual intellectual
Comprehension, man’s destiny stored
In the dark, with civilization armed
With the flashlight of the Poetic.