Filipino poetry

[WATCH] Mga tula ng pag-ibig: Leo Rialp reads Ruel S. De Vera’s ‘Isla del Fuego’

Rappler.com
[WATCH] Mga tula ng pag-ibig: Leo Rialp reads Ruel S. De Vera’s ‘Isla del Fuego’
The poem tells the story of two lovers dealing with fears of being lost in love

Veteran actor and Free the Artist Movement member Leo Rialp reads Isla del Fuego by award-winning poet Ruel S. De Vera. The poem tells the story of two lovers dealing with fears of being lost in love.

Rialp is a seasoned theater actor, known for his role in Dulaang UP’s Haring Lear, a Filipino adaptation of the Shakespearean classic King Lear.

De Vera received the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature and the Philippines Free Press Literary Award. At present, he writes and edits for the Philippine Daily Inquirer.

Read the full text here:

Isla del Fuego
by Ruel S. De Vera

Burning in the fiction
of affection, we lie
sprawled and separate
on the satin sand,

with only your stranded
silence spanning
this damp distance
between us.

It is your incandescent
fear of touch that keeps us
constantly apart
like shoreline and sea.

You are afraid that, once joined,
we can no longer be sundered,
can no longer tell who is who,
what is what, whose is whose.

But even now,
the mangrove finds
the milling shadows melded
into its many limbs.

Already this sky, stained saffron
by sunset, decants the last light
of this naked night’s coupling
with the afternoon.

So leave your fear
to be washed away
by the waterworn forgetfulness
of flotsam and sand,

and discover that love,
like embers and fleeting fireflies,
can blot out
even the most careful of stars.

– Rappler.com

Special thanks to Ruel S. De Vera, Leo Rialp, and Free the Artist Movement

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