Photo by Mathew MacQuarrie on Unsplash

Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.

Ornamental

Vanitas means that all art
is a lament, the mantled
 
table with an antler, a map
depicting the realm of the known
 
world, a skull against a lantern.
A mirror. Still life of an altar
 
whose tenor is loss, pure
as the moan of a dowager
 
in her deathbed. What manner
of dying must we learn and how
 
can we atone for everything
laid out, each name ornate
 
in another language? None
of these remain, however real
 
they were and heavy
with omens. Worms have long
 
eaten the apple caught
in sweet decay. We make
 
a meal from what we reap
while some devote their hands
 
to the fluency of brush
and pigment: this spot a dab
 
of bone white and cerulean,
here the rust of iron oxide.

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Rodrigo Dela Peña, Jr.’s poems have been published in Rattle, Shanghai Literary Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, We Are A Website, SingPoWriMo, and other journals and anthologies. He has received prizes from the Palanca Awards, Kokoy Guevara Poetry Competition, British Council, among others. He is the author of two chapbooks, Requiem and Hymnal, and his first full-length collection, Aria and Trumpet Flourish, is forthcoming from Math Paper Press in Singapore.