To a Friend Off to One of the Many Writing Workshops in the States

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R. C. Sunico

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You will need no pens to bring,

no foolscap.  Lexicons and thesauruses

ripen on shelves there, more often

than wheat on their fields.

 

Bring only your lust and irony,

a well-fitting rubber and

prepare in your memory

 

Flasks with which to capture

the first snow on the timberline,

the attar of magnolias

and the unerring V of the first ducks

arrowing towards a warmer dawn.

 

Eye classrooms with suspicion.

Eschew seminars and calling cards,

pre-meditated allusions to writers

you have never read, now suddenly

in academic vogue.

 

Avoid weak beer and the dead among them

who compete over the obscurities of rhyme.

Be poet and sing.  Endow them

with the phosphorescences of our clime.

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Mga Tula (Pilipino) | Poems (English)