Friday, August 14, 2015

Dead stars


without any moonlight to upstage it—the new moon having approached the night sky only this morning—yesterday was the best time to have had observed the spectacle of the meteor shower, these space debris making their last hurrah, in the hemisphere i now live in. 

officially a colony of the united states for a good half a century, my country and its post war literature are littered with poor copies of american models.  one short story though, one most regard the first filipino short story written in english, is this gem i was assigned to read as an overwrought third year high school student.  written by an early modernist, paz marquez-benitez, a female breakout writer in a country that just allowed women into its universities, it’s titled dead stars.  “so all these years—since when?—he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.”

and that’s that. how things seamlessly fit only on pages. right hemisphere, alright, but too shot from work to go out and revel in the sky raining with shooting stars, yet too wired for sleep and only has the literary appetite for big brother reruns.