With a question. It’s that lilt at the end, an openness, a gap asking to be filled, a silence, an invitation toward communion. Why are we here? Have you eaten? What disturbs the trees? How would it feel to be a worm, living its one humble nematode life? What are the limits of human cruelty? Why does the heart clench over the suffering of another, and what words can render this clenching?

The response matters less than the act of responding itself. What do I feel is not the real question. Why do I feel the way I feel is closer. Why do I say I feel the way I feel when in fact there is some other feeling is closer still. What is this other feeling, this secret awaiting discovery, what is unsaid and can I find it in myself to say it, say it to you; am I willing to pick on the scabs, expose raw flesh, ask another to share in the wound…. 

Are you beginning to understand now?  It is in this motion– inward and deepward, a digging– that poetry resides. In this excavation, this defiance, this shovel’s edge against our routine human inertia. 

The rest, as they say in chess, is a matter of technique. To hear the whispering energies of a random line and follow where it leads. To stare at a cliff and consider the fall. To imagine wings. To find a structure that is able to hold the simplest weight aloft. To build a rhythm that enhances breath, that achieves an emotional contour.  To find the kairos of a direct address or a tangential image or a simple declarative. To wield the lyric. To chip away at what does not feel right. To allow room for mystery. To traffic in uncertainty. To persist despite finitude. To lacerate a branch and into the laceration insert a clump of soil, another stem; to wrap a palm around it until the field comes into view.

For example: What do I see? This glass here, the way water refracts light. Another wall. Behind it a view of me as a child: Mounds of rice husks burning under the summer sun, an entire village chasing a wayward chicken. And finally, blood.

For example: Can you hear me? Hold this branch, I need both hands, and a road wide enough for this yearning.

For example: How do I begin?

Mikael de Lara Co is the Editor-in-Chief of JournalIXM by IXM Hakuhodo, and concurrently serves as Head of Copy for the agency. His books of poetry and translations have been named finalist for the National Book Award four times. He has won the Palancas five times and the Maningning Miclat Award for poetry twice. He worked in advocacy and strategic political communications before joining IXM Hakuhodo.