Bonsai by edith tiempo how to#
As a result, the couple’s challenge had been how to keep the flame of their love burning.
Bonsai by edith tiempo series#
Part of a series about how a divided couple deals with pain of separation are the stories “Kahit sa Malayo,” “Pasko ng Mumunting Pangarap,” at “Lihim ng Agosto.” In the series, Sylvia was forced to work in Japan as a singer due to poverty and leave her husband, Fidel and their daughter, Marianne.
Bonsai by edith tiempo license#
Taken from the experiences of the Filipino women Rivera met as a testing officer of TESDA, an agency that gives license for Filipinas to work abroad as singers and dancers, the stories included in the collection are jigsaw pieces that when put together will complete a puzzle that could turn into a novel. This well-loved and over-used quotation was proven by the characters of Tuhug-Tuhog: 25 Maiikling Kuwento ng Pag-ibig at Pakikipagsapalaran ng mga OFWs (Navotas Press, 2005), a collection of short stories about love written by the award-winning writer Frank G. The essence of the poem is that love is simplified and reduced so one can hold it in one hand and pass it on to another. It is the same with love, that something so vast and huge can be contained in a small thing is a mystery. In the line, “Till seashells are broken pieces” the mystery of how something so vast such as the ocean can be heard from something so small such as a seashell. It signifies the lover’s basic needs, that which is “the need to love and be loved.” A cupped hand was the metaphor specifically used to convey the image of asking and giving love to another. The lines, “A feat, this heart’s control/ Moment to moment/ To scale all love down/ To a cupped hand size” pertain to one’s victory in sublimating and taking hold of love so that it will not be destructive. The next stanza tells about how when love is sublimated, it is made into something positive. Tiempo even made love familiar and within reach by reducing it to things that people use and hold dear such as “Son’s note, or Dad’s gaudy tie,/ A roto picture of a young queen/ A blue Indian shawl, even/ A money bill.” By using these objects in the poem, Tiempo portrayed the sublimation of love as something that is abstract like gas penetrating the vast space surrounding two people into something that is concrete like a solid object that one can hold unto and control. It was like saying often one remembers a lover but there are times when he does not. Then there came the question in the next line that said, “All that I love?” The interrogative statement was posed for self-examination which was, in the next stanza, assured with the lines “Why, yes but for the moment-/ And for all time, both.” The two lines are an oxymoron for love can be both temporal and eternal. Memory stays with a person forever but it is often unreliable which is why there is a need to simplify love if it has become overwhelming so that it is easy to handle and quick to retrieve the memories from the labyrinths of the mind. In the first stanza, Bonsai describes everything one loves as something that could be folded into the smallest size so that one could “keep in a box/ Or a slit in a hollow post/ Or in my shoe.” The idea is to turn one large concept such as love into something that “folds and keeps easy” so that one’s memory will not be cluttered.
In this work of literature, love is the abstract idea.
The poem is an example of a work that is objective-correlative wherein the ideas depicted are abstract. This is the destructive nature of love which is why the award-winning poet Edith Tiempo, in her poem Bonsai, scaled down love into a “cupped hand size.” And in the hands of people who are unable to control it, love overwhelms the person. When love is great, when love is profound, it becomes more difficult to control.
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