Live Encounters Poetry & Writing August 2024
Waking in the Dead Hour, poems by David Oliveira.
Waking in the Dead Hour
No lover rousing early, no soughs from trees or river,
no birds signaling dawn, no hum of traffic,
no stars, Moon’s full light two weeks away
as loneliness pours into the cruel pitch of night,
slaking the self’s stubborn addiction to misery.
With nothing to look at, thoughts turn inward,
a landscape fraught with misinformation and lies
amid mirrors reflecting the vacant everything.
Hours later, after night has drawn gradually away
and light becomes the breath of revelation,
worlds reappear in expected places and
the sweet comfort of familiarity pervades the air.
Shadow hours call out persons to look back at life,
which cannot be held up with too much pride
as little of it their own making, merely
mouthfuls of foredoom whispered to the dark.
The World Will Bear Witness, Again
I’m not trying to convince you of anything.
Neither am I trying to impose the beauties
and music of language, which are abundant,
over the strains and difficulties of living,
of which there is also an abundance.
I am trying to say that we are not a species
which seems to learn from overcoming problems.
With our great minds and enormous talents,
we bring the same sins back time and again,
exacerbate them, improve tools of delivery.
We assume the species will ultimately survive,
that the good angels eventually will out,
that we have capacity to create the world
in the harmonies of equity and peace
despite a paucity of evidence.
Our science teaches our world is fragile,
that our existence depends on good luck
more than good inventions or intentions.
Someday, humans, the good and the bad,
will be cleansed from this remarkable Earth.
From that, whatever stories, if any, come,
only the countless stars will bear witness.
The World from Café Novo
I will walk in the morning without forgetting.
I will look at serious faces walking past
and wonder if they too are absorbed with regrets.
I will still wonder this from an outside table
at Café Novo watching more faces walk by.
I will wait for cappuccino while light dances
through mango leaves into unserious patterns
on the table in my unimposing corner
where no one knows me, and I know no one either—
where I hide seething angers raging beyond sense
behind screens of convivial conversations
and shyness that should have desisted long ago.
The world’s no more unjust today than yesterday;
so why has release forsaken me in old age?
Time swipes each hard-earned year from my life with such speed,
it’s a kindness nerves numb me against feeling it.
Men and women who frequent the café also
bring their hard lives which come for each differently.
Though none are blameless here and all arrive lonely,
they do not remain alone. They sit at tables
beside people who sit at tables beside other people,
none of whom come with maps showing their connections.
Such is the price exacted for walking on Earth,
for the luxury of sitting in this café,
this calm space from which to unfold our destinies,
the stories we make up, step by step, as we go.
May 3rd 2024
Late night brings flashes of distant lightning
on schedule to start the rainy season,
though still a bit too soon for rains themselves,
which should come along in a week or so,
not an uncertainty that would trouble
anyone born to incessant changes
in Earth’s raging days. As the present one
that planned to nest evening in quiet dark
before fierce winds opened across branches
and sound turned from air whipping against leaves
to hard spatters of water on a roof—
rain, at its insistence, coming early.
© David Oliveira
I have lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for 22 years. I am retired from teaching, academia, and IT, peppered with stints as a publisher, editor, poet, and poetry advocate. Nowadays, I concentrate on writing poetry and maintaining some contact with the old poetry life in California. I have two full length poetry collections, the most recent, Still Life with Coffee (Brandenburg Press, 2022). I am included in several anthologies, one of which I co-edited with Christoper Buckley and M.L. Williams, How Much Earth: The Fresno Poets (Heyday Books, 2001).