Metal Ox Moon

By Ella Wagemakers

Metal Ox Moon, the author's second poetry collection, refers to her Chinese zodiac signshe was born in the Year of the Ox, and her element is metal. The poems, though, are far from metallic in character. She dubs this book a reluctant collection because of the uncertainty in her desire to have it published.

Excerpt of a review of Sorrows of the Chameleon:
Interesting inclusions are several haiku, senryu, tanka and a haibun, which combines haiku with travelbound prose. . . . Wagemakers succeeds in transposing her expatriate Filipina verses into exhalations of the eye, as a sigh of an insight. . . . Her mild sorrows are . . . universal, however acutely personal, and thus charming with many skins and colours. I look forward to more of her delicate poetry.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514455982

Ella Wagemakers

Born of unknown parentage sometime toward the end of September 1961 in Manila, Ella Wagemakers emigrated to the Netherlands in 1988 and became a Dutch citizen in 1993. She obtained a master's degree in education in Tilburg in 2003, worked full-time at the Dutch Police Academy for nine years, and is currently teaching business communications and project management at the Hogeschool Rotterdam (Rotterdam University) in the IBMS programme of the Rotterdam Business School. Her first book (written in Dutch) is an eight-hundred-plus-page genealogy of the Wagemakers family. Her first poetry collection, Sorrows of the Chameleon, was published by Xlibris in 2007. Metal Ox Moon is her second collection. She lives with her husband, Adrian, in West Brabant, is still active with genealogy, and is also into photography, travel, reading, and philately.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Ella Wagemakers. 734666

ISBN:      Softcover            978-1-5144-5599-9

                Hardcover           978-1-5144-5600-2

                EBook                 978-1-5144-5598-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 02/10/2016

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To Adrian,

who is always there

And to Magdalena,

or Salomé, or Selina,

or whatever her name is,

who was, and is, never there

CONTENTS

BASILICA OF ST. BARBARA AND ST. AGATHA

HALF

SLOWLY

TO SALOMÉ

MOTHER’S DAY

LAST NIGHT, FIRST DAY

AB KHUTAM HOGIA

PRAGUE, 2010

GARDENER

SPRING EVE

RAG DOLL

HAIKU INSPIRED BY SANTOKA TANEDA

FIVE TANKA

HAIKU – MAY 2012 TO MAY 2013

AUTUMN AND WINTER

THREE TANKA

AGAIN AND AGAIN

BLUE

BROWN

MOODS OF A MARCH EVENING

KHUDA HAFIZ

DUR KHAIMA

IN TWOS

NOT YET

FOR ROHIT VEMULA

THE HERALD TRIBUNE

THE SUMMER OF 2007

OUR LADY OF PERPETUAL HELP

WHIRLING

THINGS I’VE NEVER DONE

ON THE ROAD

ON THE 27TH, AN OVAL MOON

THIS IS WHAT I WANT

ROOM

THREE LINES WITHOUT A KIGO

YET ANOTHER

NONCHALANCE

DONSÓL

BORACAY

CORÓN

SIARGAO

DAWN

BASILICA OF ST. BARBARA AND ST. AGATHA

The pigeons and doves have changed their tune.

It used to be jazzy, slightly tipsy and syncopated,

even flirtatiously suggestive.

Now the blackbirds and magpies ignore them –

   serves them right!

But they don’t care, never having been introduced.

On Sundays, the carillon clangs them awake,

sending them with both wings into the morning,

right into the eye of a ten-o’-clock hangover.

On Mondays they’re back under the oak branches

spread across the square,

picking their way through heaps of dog dirt,

the sulfuric scent of worn-out rubber tires

coating the red brick road and the fallen acorns,

but they shake their beaks in indifference.

Somewhere down the Fenkelstraat, a child