The Big Blue and Me

I’ve wanted to write an “Ocean” poetry book for a long time. It seems like always. I remember trying several years ago then abandoning it when something else came up. It’s as if I couldn’t find the right muse, the most demanding muse, to write “Ocean” poems. Four stormy days in Cebu changed all that. The words here are the ones I lived with for the past several weeks, and they remain to me important. This book, in a way, chronicles my recent feelings about life and living. I don’t believe a man can write about the ocean and not include himself. Much of me is here and I have used the ocean as a platform to speak about the times and the seasons and people’s relationships to one another. Most of all, I’ve used the ocean to write about loving. I’ve also included here some old poems that I think had an “Ocean” theme. Psychologists equate man’s love for the ocean with motherlove. No wonder so many sun-tanned young men and women look at us from magazines and television, selling beer and cigarettes from docks and sailboats! I have made love and thought myself a lover by the ocean. Caught cold from it. Nearly drowned in it once or twice and walked alone by it more often than I care to remember. I’ve known the oceans off Olongapo and Subic Bay, Laguna and Batangas, Pangasinan and Manila, Cebu and Davao, and I’ve loved them all. How much fun it was to write about the ocean! How much fun it will be to write about it again. Everyday I thank God for the chance. It is marvelous to know that I am not too young anymore (I’m turning 30 this year) and not very old either. And that I’ll be writing poems about the ocean for a long, long time to come. This should be the first of many, I hope and believe. I cross the streets more carefully now.

Raymund Tamayo, January 2009