BLOWN GLASS (after Steuben)

Through etchings on the glass, water-clear, 

Earthy Venus bursts on a bed of grass; 

Airy grass splits to blades of jade 

Under the fullness of her limber thighs. 

In her arms, a child of pulsing dehiscence,

 Cradles in the throbbing hollow of her breasts.

 Mother and child, of birthing burning clay, 

Fashioned by rapture’s rupture, inmost fire;

 Wakened by bathos and warm blood; 

Heat thawed their spatial rims and borrowed time, 

The span of silent voices, grass and earth, 

The dense reaches of their finite souls.

 From grains of sand, heaving with motion’s birth, 

To molten red, blown by some fervid breath,

 Blown full, blown quickly before the sweeping 

Dryness of obstructive winds; 

Fashioned in this etching on the glass, 

Caged in stillness, trapped from death.

 This puffed breath blares the living voice 

Of mortal deity, immortal artificer, 

Whose fragile fingers and breathing mouth 

Roused the fluid mass and clay, 

Snared the fleeting patterns of the eye, 

Touched and traced quick gestures into glass.

 Sands & Coral 1968

Elsa Victoria Martinez 1968 Co-editor  Sands & Coral 

Elsa Victoria Martinez is an award-winning poet, fictionist, and playwright from Dumaguete City her roots from Tanjay City. She finished her Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, and then her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Silliman University, where she was also crowned as Miss Silliman in 1964. She went on to obtain her Ph.D. in Language and Literature from De La Salle University. She has received the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for her poetry, short story, drama, teleplay, and screenplays through the years resulting in being given its Hall of Fame distinction in 1999. She has also received awards from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Philippines Free Press. As a poet, she is the author of the collection Katipunara and Other Poems, published in 1998. Martinez-Coscoluella (her married name) also wrote the full-length play “In My Father’s House,” which was staged at the University of the Philippines and at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1988, and in Silliman University in 2013. In 1990, she received the Outstanding Artist in Literature Award from the Negros Occidental Centennial Commission and in 1996, she was named National Fellow for Drama by the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center. She became the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod City in 1991. She co-founded and directed the annual Negros Summer Workshops for Artists and Writers in 1991, and the IYAS Creative Writing Workshop in 2000 in collaboration with Cirilo Bautista, Marjorie Evasco, and the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center of De La Salle University in Manila. Coscolluela is an Associate of the Silliman University Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center.