Jose Villa's "Inviting a Tiger for the weekend" and "I was speaking of oranges to a lady" in World Poetry (An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to our Time) PART TWO

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As a continuation to the entry on Jose Villa posted earlier in PART ONE, here is his two more poems.

Jose Villa's two other poems "Inviting a Tiger for the weekend" and "I was speaking of oranges to a lady" are entertaining and light read despite the fact that I still have to point out that they do not reflect anything about or specifically Filipino. I still liked the Jose Rizal entry which I blogged about earlier.

Inviting a Tiger for a Weekend
Jose Garcia Villa

Inviting a tiger for a weekend.
The gesture is not heroics but discipline.
The memories will be splendid.

Proceed to dazzlement, Augustine.
Banish little birds, graduate to tiger.
Proceed to dazzlement, Augustine.

Any tiger of whatever colour
the same as jewels any stone
Flames always assential morn.

The guest is luminous, peer of Blake.
The ghost is gallant, eye of Death.
If you will do this you will break.

The little religious for my sake.
Invite a tiger for a weekend,
Proceed to dazzlement, Augustine.

***
I was speaking of oranges to a lady
Jose Garcia Villa

I was speaking of oranges to a lady
of great goodness when O the lovely

giraffes came. Soon it was all their 
splendor about us and my throat

ached with the voice of great larks.
O the giraffes were so beautiful as

if they meant to stagger us by such 
overwhelming vision: Let us give 

each rose said my beautiful lady
of great goodness and we sent the 

larks away to find roses. It was 
while the larks were away that

the whitest giraffe among them
and the goldest one among them 

O these two loveliest ones sought 
and found us: bent before us two

kneeling with their divine heads
bowed. And it was then we knew 

why all this loveliness was sent 
us: the white prince and the golden

princess kneeling: to adore us
brightly: we the Perfect Lovers.

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