Another Poem

A friend had me analyze this poem for her. I liked it enough to post it here. :)

The First Dream

The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

-Billy Collins

The 13th Ateneo-Heights Writers' Workshop (Part 1)

Yep, I was there.

Actually noong una medyo napilitan lang ako. A bit of pressure from the old members (Yes, you Vip!) and the new EB that required it for Fil Staff and English Staff. Not that I never wanted to write before this point, just that I always had some excuse for whisking myself away. I spent a couple of nights in front of the computer screen cramming my stuff. Poetry was out of the question, it's a deathtrap for me with all its conventions. I'd been reading fiction all my life so that seemed an appropriate choice. I managed to write the first, "Rooms" with manageable effort. It's the kind of the fiction work that I'd always wanted to write. But by the second piece, I was going emo due to the fact that the work simply refused to write itself and the time before the deadline was getting exhausted. I slept on it and went to church the next day (It was a Saturday then). During the service I began to feel better about missing the workshop when I received a text informing me that they were requesting that I submit my second work! I did send in "Rooms" that morning and it seems that they liked it so much (don't ask me why :P) that they gave me another day's extension to finish. I spent the Sunday doing "Dead on Arrival" and by 12 midnight had run out of ideas on how I wanted to end the work. An hour later, I was pissed enough that I was able to give it an ending, and it was the kind of ending that you could only come up with if you were pissed.

So yeah I got in. The thing took place at Sacred Heart Novitiate (a good hour from Ateneo) in Novaliches from July 27-30.