of bushes and spilt seeds

and so we

thought we
are just writing a silly
tale of the blue bloom
and the honey-hungry
bee

and so we

I mean I wrote
with sprinkled dusts
of jealousy while you
vowed to love me
the flower
only

and so we

let the days fall
like leaves of autumn
so bloody until December
wind knocks with
a bag full of
bravery

and so we

I mean you let
the tender beans of
love spilt out of
your quite
fickle mind but
so sure heart

and so we

I mean I
measured your
question with wary
and agony thinking one
day your words will
be swallowed again
yet we did
survive

and so we

after a long act
of beating around
the messy bush we
ran for the unknown cliff
and dove hand in
hand not knowing
how we will land
but here, we are
we did
survive

and so we

become a
we.

—

01.22.2019
©2019 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

—

For dVerse Poetics: Shhhh! Do you Want to Know a Secret?

 

 

 

 

 

space of seas

Tonight, I want to stay.
No, I won’t go away.
Your midnight scent I will inhale.
Until the moon breathes another day. 

Tonight, I want to stay.
Oh, let not distance take me away.
The sun will smile, either way,
so please, just let me stay. 

My left-hand hangs incomplete,
without your right.
The space of seas between our souls
just doesn’t feel right. 

So please, don’t be astray.
Tonight, with you, I’ll stay.

r. c. gonzales – roy | page 103 of Poems for S

—

Sharing with you some excerpts of my poetry book, Poems for S!

Kindle and paperback available here: https://amzn.to/379k2Qd

—

©2019 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

newton’s apple

Like how an innocent a p p l e
birthed Newton’s law of gravity,
your child-like smile, my love,
freed the caged lover inside me,

effortlessly.

r. c. gonzales – roy | page 99 of Poems for S

—

Sharing with you some excerpts of my poetry book, Poems for S!

Kindle and paperback available here: https://amzn.to/2CSrGAU .

—

©2020 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

6 Lessons I Learned from Little Fighter, Chika Jeune (perhaps a book review)

Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family by  Mitch Albom

Chika Jeune was born three days before the devastating earthquake that decimated Haiti in 2010. She spent her infancy in a landscape of extreme poverty, and when her mother died giving birth to a baby brother, Chika was brought to The Have Faith Haiti Orphanage that Albom operates in Port Au Prince.

With no children of their own, the forty-plus children who live, play, and go to school at the orphanage have become family to Mitch and his wife, Janine. Chika’s arrival makes a quick impression. Brave and self-assured, even as a three-year-old, she delights the other kids and teachers. But at age five, Chika is suddenly diagnosed with something a doctor there says, “No one in Haiti can help you with.”

Mitch and Janine bring Chika to Detroit, hopeful that American medical care can soon return her to her homeland. Instead, Chika becomes a permanent part of their household, and their lives, as they embark on a two-year, around-the-world journey to find a cure. As Chika’s boundless optimism and humor teach Mitch the joys of caring for a child, he learns that a relationship built on love, no matter what blows it takes, can never be lost.

Told in hindsight, and through illuminating conversations with Chika herself, this is Albom at his most poignant and vulnerable. Finding Chika is a celebration of a girl, her adoptive guardians, and the incredible bond they formed—a devastatingly beautiful portrait of what it means to be a family, regardless of how it is made.

—

Whenever I was asked about the book that has changed my life, my answer has always been Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. It will be followed by the story of how I have read it twice when I was 20 and jobless for almost a year despite my medals, and when I was 25 and drowning in the river called a quarter-life crisis. Both times I have discovered lessons and have found strength on Morrie and Albom’s wisdom.

Fast forward to 2019, after reading all his books in between, Mitch has announced his latest one — Finding Chika. It was launched November last year, but I did not buy it until my husband gave it to me as a surprise gift for his birthday last December. (Yes, it was his birthday and he gave me the gift. HAHA).

Almost a month after I first held this purple-coloured paperback, I found the courage to open it and finally read the story of Chika.

(Photo from https://www.mitchalbom.com/)

I know how special Chika is for Mitch Albom as I follow him on social media (being the fangirl that I am). I have also read about this little girl’s courage and bravery fighting a cruel tumour inside her young brain. Knowing these made me doubt if my heart is ready to read the inside story of their little family. But before Chika’s birthday, which is today January 9, I finally opened its pages and allowed myself to laugh, melt, learn, and weep, for them and with them.

Instead of reviewing the book, how it was written, how the story unfolded, what language was used, I choose to share the six life lessons I have learned from Mitch’s raw and honest anecdote of him, of Chika, and of their family with Janine. I believe they will move you and stir something inside you just like how they did to me.

Before that, if you may, please purchase a copy of the book as proceeds will be for the Have Faith Haiti Mission.

Here are the six lessons from the story of the birthday girl, the little fighter, Chika:

Lesson #1: There are many kinds of selfishness in this world, but the most selfish is hoarding time, because none of us know how much we have, and it is an affront to God to assume there will be more.

Lesson #2: The most precious thing you can give someone is time, Chika, because you can never get it back. When you don’t think about getting it back, you’ve given it in love.

Lesson #3: Everything in this world is music if you can hear it.

Lesson #4: One of the best things a child can do for an adult is to draw them down, closer to the ground, for clearer reception to the voices of the earth.

Lesson #5: There is no affliction like hopelessness. I believe it is worse than anything that strikes the flesh.

Lesson #6: What we carry defines who we are. And the effort we make is our legacy.

—

Happy birthday, dear Chika. I may not have known you but your story have touched and inspired me. I am sure you will never ever be forgotten. ❤

 

 

 

 

 

army of elements

Naked eyes’re powerless
for they are invisible,
smaller than dust, no less.

Creepy crawlers, void of tiny legs,
bursting from vein to vein
inside a mortal, muscled-keg.

A minuscule army of
Platinum, Fluorine, Arsenic, Boron
haunting for the invading “C”.

With a fatal glow, ‘nother option
is the clear-cut missile of
Cobalt-60 and Nickel-60.

Both weapons attack
with precision after trialled years,
Inside the lab intelligent minds

haunt periodic table for more recruits
in the race against the cursed
maker of crocodile-not tears.

Battles may end six-feet deep
or above, but all are won.

With a sliver of hope,
sunrise remains divine.

—

01.08.2019
©2020 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

—

Inspired by the book I finished last night, my first for 2020, Finding Chika: A Little Girl, an Earthquake, and the Making of a Family.

It is the story of a little Haitian girl named Chika diagnosed with a rare brain tumor. What a brave girl she was and still is.

I will be sharing more about this book in my future posts. 🙂

—

For dVerse Let’s get elemental!

Tonight, let’s get elementary. Let’s get back to the absolute basics of matter.

For Christmas this year, my son received a copy of Periodic Tales by Hugh Aldersley-Williams. It’s a book of stories about the different elements of the periodic table. I thought it might be fun to write some poems inspired by elements, and that’s what I want you to do tonight. You don’t need to have any knowledge of science to do this – we rub up against the elements every day.

When you stop and think about it, you realise there are so many elements surrounding us all the time. Maybe you’ll write about gold – the ultimate treasure? Or carbon, present in charcoal, coal, but also in diamonds? Maybe oxygen? Maybe you’ll fill a balloon with helium and let it go bobbing off; or give me a poem that’s a neon light in a dark night. Or maybe you’ll head off down into the lower layers of the table where the stranger elements like uranium and polonium lurk.

find me inside this hodgepodge: a haibun

For some reasons, a year ending has never made me reflective. I always feel like my heart is sprinkled with pastel joy from December until the first few days of January. It is the time of rest, no, not really. It is the time of doing and travelling a lot, but not for salary, but for dear friends and family.

When the calendar leaf shifts from the last month of a finished year to the first one of a fresh new one, this is when I drown in nostalgia and melancholy. This is when I pause and ponder. This is when I sink into this familiar abyss of the unknown drowning me with questions like what have I done, what will I do next, why did I do this, how should I do this, how can I do this, and more.

As steady as the ebb and flow of the sea, my overthinking overpowers me every January. Perhaps because it is my birth month. Perhaps because it is another clean slate. And how carefully we carry things that are new and shiny, right? But perhaps, this feeling of being lost will be sweeter when the answers are found. This soft petal of fear will bear fruit as my roots sink deeper into this life’s fleeting ground. Perhaps.

Endings breathe restart,
these feet hang high yet again.
A new tough seed cracks.

—

01.07.2019
©2019 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

—

For dVerse Beginning (again) – Haibun .

sareureuk

I heard the
hushed melting
of the last flake
of winter on the
drying road bathed
with the first infant
rays of spring,

I felt the
spinning earth
waited a bit,

I saw a
second lasted
more than a minute,

when you smiled at me
for the first time.

r. c. gonzales – roy | page 31 of Poems for S

—

Sharing with you some excerpts of my poetry book, Poems for S!

Kindle and paperback available here: https://amzn.to/2CSrGAU .

—

©2019 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

—

Submitted for dVerse OpenLinkNight #257

again: an aubade

My clingy heart
has never been fond
of the dawn’s pending fog
everyday sitting
outside our window,

drinking its daily
sunrays-made tea
as it waits
for the official ending
of our last night’s

nectar-sweet tryst.

Another day,
another sun,
I have to wait
for another moon
to inhale your scent

again.

r. c. gonzales – roy | page 77 of Poems for S

—

Sharing with you some excerpts of my poetry book, Poems for S!

Kindle and paperback available here: https://amzn.to/2CSrGAU .

—

©2019 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

before you

But you arrived
with the blushing
sunset, you clothed
me with shared bravery.

As we heal, hand
in hand with the
balm of every tomorrow’s
morning dew, 

let me tell you,
I didn’t know
this heart, this heart
could carry this
much love

before you.

r. c. gonzales – roy | page 31 of Poems for S

—

Sharing with you some excerpts of my poetry book, Poems for S!

Kindle and paperback available here: https://amzn.to/2CSrGAU .

—

©2019 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

weightless earth

where flood goes beyond murky dirt,
transforms into the lightness of a sea’s
cerulean hands guiding transparent streams,

where lighthouses mark the arrival
on a safer place to land, free of clawing
ghosts of the past’s unstitched seams,

where guns burst life instead of endings,
rescuing preys from predators, away
from disturb mind’s cruel schemes,

where kitchens leak of onion and garlic
a prelude to satiated stomachs courtesy
of porcelain plates filled to the brim,

where calendar leaves exhale oxygens
filling gasping lungs with breathing hope,
for the fresh January moonbeams,

where mother earth’s dress dances
with unbearable weightlessness, free from
dark hate, clothed in faith’s balming cream,

where humans are humans being,
living in a new world, a new peace-filled world—
please let not this be an impossible dream.

—

12.18.2019
©2019 Rosemawrites@A Reading Writer. All Rights Reserved.
Photo via Unsplash

—

For dVerse’s Poetics: New Year – New World

My book, Poems for S is now available here: https://amzn.to/2CSrGAU  and in India via Pothi.com: https://bit.ly/2M4KwK3