OpinionsRiverrunThis happened not too long ago, time being my...

This happened not too long ago, time being my relative

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In 1995 or was it 1996 Sands & Coral (the literary journal of Silliman University) displayed an array of campus poems one of which was mine, rather grandly bearing the title “Flaming Sword Poem.” It was among the few entries that came from the faculty. The rest were written by students, a relatively rich harvest for which I was instrumental, the editor having sought my help in asking a crazy group of campus poets to contribute – a group that the more normal students called ‘The Dead Poets Society’. After the movie of course. And of course you can guess who was Robin Williams.

Who did not have to do any asking. All he did was choose from the manuscripts that these young poets had handed him forever.

Now one of the poems did not bear the author’s name – but I was, for some text-based reason instantly positive that it was by Mark Cornelio, the surrealist (adjective) in the group. The one who had what I elsewhere called Jose Lansang Jr.’s “gift of madness”. Except that in Mark’s case, lacking Jun Lansang’s genius, few if any would call it a gift.

So the poem came out in Sands & Coral: “Unluck” written by Mark Cornelio.

However some two or three years later someone told me that a fellow in the yearly Dumaguete Writers Workshop told him he, the workshop fellow, thought the lines so unmistakably familiar. And then he was certain it was Ricky de Ungria’s poem.

I was in a panic. Suddenly I understood.

Why Mark had asked his mother if it was really his poem when Sands & Coral came out. She told me he did. Days after I had told her Mark’s poem was the best. Better than mine, I had said. I meant it. Yet let’s never underestimate the power of psychology. After finding out who the real author was – a seasoned poet – I was not so dazzled by the poem any more! (My apologies to the real author who, however, told me he does not count it among his best).

I called up Ricky de Ungria by long-distance, profuse with apology. But to my relief Ricky, after asking me to read the first line or two of the poem said it was not his.

So the poem was Mark’s after all? No, the poem turned out to be Krip Yuson’s!

Who, when the mystery was cleared, merely grinned it away, not keen on setting anything straight, an attitude foreshadowed by his sending me the poem without his name written after the poem’s title or last line.

I still had a problem in my hands – a veritably insoluble one. What was I to do, to clear innocent Mark? It was I who in all ignorance, passed the poem off as his!

I was in a bind.

For years, nay decades, Mark had been bringing to me – and to the late National Artist Ma’am Edith – manuscripts of his poems, season after season, blue moon after blue moon, and not just poems, paintings and drawings as well, of uncertain worth all in all, perhaps, though Mark, to my mind, had reached a level of at least persistence that if one could accommodate the possibility that one modern monk in a million hacking away at one million laptops in a million centuries might produce the lyrics of the Platters’ hit song “One In A Million” I was willing to believe he had enough in him to come up with a poem that reads like a breakthrough description, and therefore exorcism, of his plight, which I thought he miraculously had.

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Author’s email: [email protected]

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