[WATCH] Mga tula ng pag-ibig: Dingdong Dantes reads Lakshmi Gulle’s ‘A Key Change in the Major Scale’

Actor and member of Aktor Dingdong Dantes reads A Key Change in the Major Scale by Lakshmi Gulle. The piece explores a change in the major scale – the most commonly used scale in Western music – as a metaphor for falling in love.

Dantes is an award-winning actor for film and TV, and was former head of the National Youth Commission. He is an advocate for civic issues and participative governance.

Gulle is a student majoring in French at the University of the Philippines. She writes poetry and short stories.

Read the full text here:

A Key Change in the Major Scale
by Lakshmi Gulle

If I were someone of courage
I would ask How dare you?

How dare you haunt my thoughts
And sing your songs in my head?

A piano was just a piano
Black keys on white
Cold and inanimate

Then you appear
A specter in daylight

Slender fingers
Coaxing melodies from the ivories
Notes that float on water
And shake my heart like thunder

Now I wait for you
In every rest
Hoping to hear you
In the next measure

You are the crescendo I anticipate
Your name in the rhythm of my pulse

How dare you harmonize
With my unfinished symphonies
And strike a chord in perfect pitch?

– Rappler.com

Special thanks to Lakshmi Gulle, Dingdong Dantes, and Aktor.