The Halo-Halo Review

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

THE POETRY OF LINDA TY-CASPER

Editor's Note: The Halo-Halo Review is immensely honored to present Linda Ty-Casper's first and only stand-alone poem after writing a poem in grade school that garnered her a check for one peso. We consider this publication a historic literary moment since Linda Ty-Casper is more well-known as a fictionist, having written 15 novels, novellas, and short stories. Please go HERE to see an accompanying essay about this poem and Linda Ty-Casper's poetry. This feature is also The Halo-Halo Review's birthday present to this writer who turns 94 years old today. Dear Linda: Happy Birthday!

Running Secretly, Singing

I must admit some days beat like a bird

inside my heart.

Its beak stabs.

Its feathers molt.

And I can only weep.

Some days, I must admit,

come so quietly I think I am at peace.

I think it is the next day

too far away to hurt.

Some days are like swallows.

Only the tips of their flying touch me.

Some days, when I cannot carry the weight

of a single word,

Like a bird from a different forest

my body sings

running words together

in and out of key.

I also sing to lie to myself.

I sing because someone might bury me

if I fall silent.

I notice some trees sing.

And stones sing.

Attempting to climb above the sun, light sings.

Grass sings.

The men with seven or eleven fingers sing.

And lying, accusing

confessing, breathing

are also singing.

I don’t remember the wind moving deep and still.

Full of blooms.

I don’t recall the sun swinging

with hungry arms

above the wind.

But I remember stones lighter than rain,

birds clinging with their beaks

to summer.

I tell the day by how long

it takes the road to turn.

The sun tells it in languages overheard.

The moon guesses.

It’s here. It’s gone.

And time again to ask what day.

It takes more than I have of courage

not to ask.

It takes memory not to know,

to make promises.

In honor of my coming

My parents opened the window of their house.

It clung to the sun.

They set the chairs against the light,

covered the table with newspapers,

lit an empty box for a candle.

We didn’t have time to sit together.

The years—twenty, thirty—of mutual absence—

sat between us.

I cried. They cried.

But not together.

Once, I received a letter addressed to a house

we’ve never lived in.

Keep in touch, it said.

I turned it over, tore the corners.

Nothing fell out.

It bore my name, nothing else.

I should write to the house

to ask for directions.

The stars fix the hours as they please.

The minutes do not count.

I find myself in attitudes of prayer,

but not praying;

of grief, but not sad;

of love, but not loving.

I keep trying.

I have trouble realizing how strange time is.

It plunges through trees madly

pursuing, like a hunter.

Then, when I take chase, refuses to move,

to complete my life.

Keep its promises.

So close to being gone.

It moves again

forming like budwood.

Crying, like a lost child.

Stretching its hand

to where it is afraid to go.

The sun flowers in secret petals.

All the happiness I feel

is someone else’s.

I cannot taste the sweetness.

I walked over to the yard across.

Between the thorns

through trees that hid the river

from my window.

It flows dry past my garden.

Resuming, after.

The neighbors watched me cut branches.

The upper part with hidden roots I gave them.

I kept the shade.

They thought I did it for them

and thanked me.

I pressed my face upon the lily

reaching for the sky.

The sun began to climb my neck,

its waves gentle.

There are other skies.

Little by little my hidden garden fades

I line stones to water it.

It sends up roots instead of branches;

I bury fish beside them.

String it to the sun.

I dig. I cry.

And find myself growing in its place

etoliating

with neither grace nor fire.

The trees we planted twenty years ago

are taller than the house.

They intercept the sun

They cannot cross the sky.

Wind cannot blow through their tangles.

I dig monardas to lure hummingbirds

and think of those that never took.

The ones that loopers defoliated their first summer.

The yard is full of their memory,

their absent leaves bearing thorns

In place of flowers.

I opened the door of my house,

stood at the top of the steps

for someone to come.

Stood by the closed door.

It may be that nothing is worth taking.

So I rained down laces.

Hurled earrings.

Dropped silver spoons.

I dangled.

Still, no one.

I have this habit of dusting

only where it shows.

Pieces of glass lie broken

underneath the ferns

And this other habit I have

of running up and down the hours

I have to break, too.

Sometimes, to hide, I take off my clothes.

Pull threads apart

and slip them under the pillows.

Expecting sunless dreams.

Bodies no longer lifting

from brown encirclements.

Like dead wells buried in dust

In the morning, fresh from anguish,

I weave the threads back together,

cover my face,

and breathe through the altered

heart.

I come as a surprise to myself.

I say what I did not think.

I think what I did not feel.

Someone must be making my arms move

when all I want is to be still.

My tongue speaks

when all I wish is to be good.

Here I am again

disturbing myself with things

I have no name for.

Hurting myself with what never happened.

Yet, I am my best friend.

If I have to lie

I do it to myself.

Keeping all the pain.

Some days my thoughts outstare the sun.

Subdued, they move dark

inside begonias.

My heart builds each day slowly.

Foraging.

Resisting desires.

It tries retreat.

But footsteps track it down

traveling two abreast.

I find living quite annoying.

Shoes must fit.

Phones must be answered.

Doors must be polished.

And one must recognize oneself

to move.

All this takes time

of which life has not enough.

Sundays, I take coffee.

Spread it on my brow.

Butter it on my palms.

Test it with my toe.

After it gets cold, I pour it

for the birds,

The price of coffee is beyond their means.

Besides, it shines their feathers

and they can preen

While I,

can wait for Monday

to have tea again.

I passed yards and yards for sale.

House after house

of cups without lips.

In none was there for sale

dreams unattached to sleep

or pieces matching what I have.

Only linen much abused.

Dresses old before their fabric.

Shoes, the feet that pushed them

out of shape

imprisoned in the leather

Toys, the hands that tugged at them

still at the rips.

I have my own of those.

I’ve heard the wails of hidden angels

like a waterfall that doesn’t reach the earth,

that hangs forever

from now to now.

I called to them.

Only myself answered.

I could not see or hear

or feel the throb

or recognize a lie.

He said I have hills,

lifting them with his tongue.

I shuddered.

I have other dreams that interrupt my hours

raging like bees

plunging from rivers in the sky

like trees full of wings

silent like circles.

He excites them with his fingers.

Lifts them with his eyes.

And I sleep.

In the same sleep, horses pull the air apart.

Gnashing.

I open the windows,

feel my arms reaching to push.

In the morning all are closed

as if I am an empty house

that needed to be sealed.

Some mornings I wake up with

the anger of the day before

still inside

cutting, like crystals

in the eye.

I try to wash it out.

It stays.

I shout curses.

Unable to bear its face on mine it leaves.

But then, it’s morning again.

My dream brought me down once

in Antofagasta.

I saw children licking rain out of the sky.

It leaked right out of their bones.

The mountain turned to mud

and buried the morning.

The same thing happened in Cauit

In Antipolo. Bocaue.

I climbed back on my dream

before I got stranded.

My dream speaks in languages I do not know.

Sometimes, in numbers.

To make it stick to someone else

I tempt it to have its own dream.

It moans, laughing.

I try to pry it loose.

It laughs, moaning.

Apparently, it means to have me.

Lately, dreams refuse to come.

I wake up with nothing that happened in my sleep.

I sleep, nothing happened

in my waking.

Unopposed, I have nothing to be strong against.

On principle I do not trust the sun.

It could stop rising after I learned to expect it.

On the same principle I resent flowers

so certain of themselves

they feed on the cracks of my thoughts

thinking to make me smile.

Stones are safer.

But one risks remembering with them,

promising.

And air adorns itself with fragrances

breaking into sealed flesh,

unsealing them.

The only thing to do is to wait for nothing to happen.

Then there will be nothing to disappoint.

One cannot be displaced then.

But if nothing should happen

how do I know nothing did?

It surprises me

that those who have what I should have

resent me for deserving it.

Just now I saw my enemy

enter the house of my friend.

I imagine them saying good things about me.

Happy to have a friend who asks my enemy over

I return their thoughts to them

for whom no road is wide enough.

For whom the sky has to climb higher

to escape the prick of their ambition.

At least I saw her go in.

I can expect to see her leave.

As far as hell I went today

I built its fire upon the stove

with cards and crackers

bits of things, my watch and loneliness.

I don’t know how to reach beyond.

I know everyone’s name.

But not my own: is it I?

The same as yours?

It must be innocence that makes me think

at forty-seven,

womb-plucked, I can bear again.

That my aunts will wait for me to come

before they die.

Hear my thoughts of them

that sear the sky.

But I forget to write to them in the morning.

Often enough I tell myself

there is no point in telling the truth

or in lying.

But I ignore the warning and try to write.

Remembering, I build a fire to burn the pages.

Hide pages at the bottom shelves, about eye level.

But I’m often tempted to pull them out.

Rummage.

Tired of being curious,

I pasted a hole in the mirror.

In my bed I carved a hollow

smaller than myself.

47. Is that the year of your birth

or the day of the week?

You say berries are buried in gardens.

All they yield are thorns,

making nooses of the grass.

There are alternate seasons

but all I feel is cold.

I have to stand up for myself,

counter you with lies.

I tell you, bones are buried

in hanging gardens.

I’ll make more up as I use them.

And tempt you to lie.

The price of ink and paper I can afford.

Writing is different.

I know enough words to fill a book.

I know the alphabet.

I’ve tried not trying.

So I can write the truth, or part of it.

I try different words

describing where a man fell,

shattered by shellfire

that blast unsuspecting trees.

To write his bones are lily-white

is to blast him again.

I need words that explode as flesh does.

Words that bear the anguish of a woman

running, clutching a pillow

she thought was her child.

Words that cut.

The way flamethrowers melt the flesh

of women hiding their children

in the folds of their skirt,

muffling their cries that alert the killers.

Somewhere on Taft, February 1945.

Ambushed at the corners in Paco,

Tennessee.

Words that describe roads

lined with blasted houses.

Rice fields where dead bodies rim the dikes.

Churchyards where dogs fight over bodies

who sought refuge inside.

How do I find words

to celebrate each life that

bullets hit

when Manila was liberated?

I’ve been asked to submit

a piece of long fiction.

Words deep enough,

significant, humanly ordinary but

Universal.

Inspiring, able to lift us to the sky.

Also entertaining.

Private but visible.

That can be read in one sitting

and will not leave a taste

or the bite of a wound.

Out of life (comic). Into life (tragic).

Perfect, ponderable. Masking grief.

Maybe next year. Next life. Or, never.

Lately, I haven’t been seen around much.

What have you been doing?

Writing. But not that much.

Singing. A little of that.

What I’ve been a lot of

is dying.

It doesn’t take much.

Do you want to hear about that?

For days now, three? I’ve been reciting my sins

that bear no resemblance to anyone’s.

Of my peculiar doing,

I’ve hidden them where I cannot find them.

Until, absolved, I can hide them again.

Myself willing.

I’m trying to find a better word for love.

The human kind

though seals and trees might feel them.

The kind that bears its thorns lovingly

as pearls.

And doesn’t speak or ask.

There is another word, I think, for grace.

It slipped my mind just now.

It has to do with turning the other cheek

so only the smile shows.

With keeping your eyes dry

while your body weeps.

With saying what you mean

with words you won’t regret.

I meant to go to church today

tut remembered the other people.

Paul, himself, when he noticed

people, took to writing letters.

All those hands I have to shake

unravel my prayers.

All the songs He cannot sing

God makes me.

He tires the arms I lift to Him.

He knows but will not tell me my name.

If He wanted to find me

He could.

For that matter, death could.

We live in the same country.

Hour after hour the sun plunges headlong

out of the sky

Standing on ceremonies.

My knees can no longer bend

My fingers cannot hold the beads

or release the chain.

Yet, I keep singing

Awake.

In the end, how can Saint Peter

tell which war killed which:

by the wounds perhaps.

Or who succumbed to which government

foreign or their own.

Who simply gave up,

dying by themselves

If he had to know,

Saint Peter will have trouble

guessing about me.

When the Kingdom comes

If I am saved in it

and brought to the tree

that first yielded

I must remember to ask

If I will be allowed

a moment to myself.

My own dream. And waking.

An eternity in a closed garden.

***

SELECTED RECENT LINKS ON LINDA TY-CASPER

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Ty_Casper

Positively Filipino’s “A Second Life For Linda Ty-Casper’s ‘Three-Cornered Sun’” by Cecilia Manguerra-Brainard: https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/a-second-life-for-linda-ty-caspers-novel-three-cornered-sun

Esquire Philippines’ “Lives Remembered, Histories Regained” by Charlie Samuya Veric: https://www.esquiremag.ph/culture/books-and-art/lives-remembered-histories-regained-a7837-20250908-lfrm2

Positively Filipino’s “Linda Ty-Casper, Master Storyteller” by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard: https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/linda-ty-casper-master-storyteller

The Halo Halo Review’s “The Early Short Stories of Linda Ty-Casper” by Lynn M. Grow: https://halohaloreview.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-early-short-stories-of-linda-ty.html

Exploding Galaxies’ “Filipino author Linda Ty-Caspeer on life, writing and remembering”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbHnmP2MQag&t=19s

Positively Filipino’s “Remembering A Life Well-Lived” by Lynn M. Grow: https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/remembering-a-life-well-lived

(Photo by Bill Edmunds)

LINDA TY-CASPER "RUNNING SECRETLY, SINGING"

The Revelation Of Linda Ty-Casper’s Poem, “Running Secretly, Singing”

By Eileen R. Tabios

My To-Be-Read stacks contain books numbering in the hundreds (even thousands before a 2020 wildfire eliminated my library of over 15,500 books). So it can take me a long time—even decades—to get to certain books I’ve planned to read. Such is my excuse for taking so many years after its release to read Linda Ty-Casper’s 1985 novel, Awaiting Trespass (A Pasion).

Until reading it, I hadn’t realized that Awaiting Trespass includes the character of a poet, Telly, who creates spontaneous poems. Telly creates poems in her mind without bothering to write them down or look for publication. (Linda Ty-Casper later confirmed that Telly is the only character in her books who “thought poetry.”)

I coincidentally—or synchronistically!—read Awaiting Trespass while exploring the general topic of poems written within novels. It’s a topic close to me as a poet who writes novels, and whose two released novels—DOVELION and The Balikbayan Artist—involve poet characters and include not just poems but poetics discussions. As such, I contacted Linda Ty-Casper about the Telly character as well as her thoughts on the matter—at the time I contacted her, I was thinking of writing more essays about poems within novels. The first of these essays will be published next month by STRIDE, a U.K. magazine.

I’d also recently enjoyed the latest work of another and long-time favorite novelist whose books I have followed for decades. But in his newest book, he inserted a poem that I felt is not as strong as his prose. While I never shared my opinion with the novelist (or in public), I would learn that Linda Ty-Casper had heard from another “poet” that her poems in Awaiting Trespass are not “poetic” or real poems.

I was appalled to hear such a “poet” react in that manner. Often, when anyone—poet or not—expresses what a poem is required to be, they only reveal their limitations rather than the true nature of poetry.

And I was even more appalled over that poet’s insensitivity when, unexpectedly, Linda Ty-Casper unearthed a long poem from her files, “Running Secretly, Singing.” This is Linda Ty-Casper’s only second stand-alone poem or poem written outside of Awaiting Trespass. Her first poem was one she wrote as a nine-year-old in grade school, for which she was rewarded with a check for one peso that she said she hid among her santols.

For “Running Secretly, Singing,” she said she wrote the 20-page (20 pages!) poem to “get over the phase” of being a poet. Apparently, in part due to the other poet’s reactions to Telly’s poems, Linda had felt she wasn’t a poet and, by implication, should not continue writing poems.

As evident in “Running Secretly, Singing,” Linda Ty-Casper clearly had/has the chops to write gorgeous and brilliant poems—something already implied by the evocative writing style in her novels. Indeed, when I asked the poet, publisher, and editor Aileen Cassinetto to read and share her thoughts on “Running Secretly, Singing,” the 2025 Foley Poetry Prize Awardee replied,

“The poem’s strength lies in its layering as the speaker struggles to reconcile grief, exhaustion, memory, and history. I recognize in its shifting interiority the tension in weaving together so many selves and wounds, the generational haunting forged by our hegemonic histories, and the burden of wrestling with impossible expectations. The poem triumphs through relentless witnessing which is its truest act of resilience.”

Obviously, Linda Ty-Casper could have written as a poet as effectively as a fictionist writing 15 novels, novellas, and short story collections! The gorgeous writing in Awaiting Trespass is deeply infused with a rare self- and world-awareness. One could harvest numerous sentences/lines from the novel which are resonant enough to act as epigraphs. Or cut up into verse-poems. Just look at these sample lines plucked randomly from her novel:

I come like a fugitive, unable to stay and unable to leave.

We will be like the rest of the world, who knows nothing about us because we too know nothing about ourselves.

…in terrible flight, like birds not knowing where to rest.

The sky is a false landmark.

He withdraws the hand he never placed on her.

Poems postpone suicide.

If I put a title atop the lines and inserted some line-breaks, it’d already be a legitimate poem. Bow. As a poet, I bow to the loveliness, the power, and the charismatic diction of Linda Ty-Casper’s words. These assets also show up in her character Telly’s poems or poem-fragments in Awaiting Trespass.

Bear it

A form of loneliness

A cry

(P. 22)

I bring myself

Where are you

(P. 24)

My thoughts move white

Among begonias

Rise to that brightly streaked hole in the sky

My days beat like a bird inside my heart

Multiply

Only the tips of their flying

Touch me

(P. 48)

You

Who say berries are buried in hanging gardens

All they yield are stones

Who attest to alternate seasons

All I feel is cold

I have to stand up to you

Counter you

With my own lies

I tell you

Bones lie buried in hanging gardens and the sun

Makes nooses of the grass.

(P. 48)

Virgin flesh

Borne without wildness

All you experience

Is God

Who does not come.

(P. 52)

Where he stands

There is not enough ground

For one beside.

(P. 53)

Free from sin but

Nevertheless

Unfaithful

(P. 56)

You

Who stands there

So full of goodness

In whom the Lord is pleased

If I could know

You see me

I would not need to be

Perfect

(P. 57)

I want to give you something perfect

In the manner of a sealed sky

Unopened arms

Still folded dreams that will not turn to sleep

I thought I could

Until I saw you

Standing in the sanctuary of light

Looking so full of goodness

In whom the Lord is pleased

If I could know you saw me

Knew me among others

I would not need to be

perfect

(P. 111)

We will need only three words

I don’t know

Finally, only one

No. Or yes.

Whatever is commanded

(P. 112)

Certainly not the sun

Suppose it stopped shining

After one learns to expect it?

And flowers are too

Raucous

They root in the cracks of thoughts

Thinking to make one yield

Stones are safer

But even with stones

One risks remembering

And promising

And air adorns itself

With fragrance

Cunning enough

To break into sealed

Flesh

(P. 145)

I come like the bearer of negative gifts

Unable to put my intensity

To other purpose

Than myself

(P. 145)

We are all open to failure

Each life is costly to itself

And really, all relationships are fragile

(P. 156)

A Book of Strange Hours

Locked

By Self

Drowned in grace

(P. 156)

Soon enough

It will happen

Why cry like birds

With beaks clinging to summer?

(P. 174)

but the straining towards

away from the other will be their bond

(P. 176)

In the end

How can Saint Peter

Find out which war killed which

By the wounds perhaps?

Or who

Succumbed to which government

Foreign or their own?

(P. 177)

The heads of all I love

Are bones

Down my back

Life-locked

We bleed life’s breaths

Sometimes my body remembers them singing

(P. 179)

In Awaiting Trespass, Linda’s lines are presented with slashes as line-breaks, befitting the prose form of the novel. I show the poems or poem-fragments with line-breaks rather than the slashes. I wouldn’t be surprised if, as is shown on her poem “Running Secretly, Singing,” there might be indents or other caesuras as well as stanza breaks in addition to the line breaks. But even without additional punctuative clarification, it doesn’t take much effort to claim the above as legitimate poems—as befits poems, Linda’ words bear the palpable resonance between, as well as that created by, words, with the all of it strengthened by a wise philosophical underpinning.* What Aileen Cassinetto noted in “Running Secretly, Singing” is evident in these poems-made-for-the novel: “its shifting interiority [and] the tension in weaving together so many selves and wounds.”

In addition, Awaiting Trespass presents the poet Telly who creates spontaneous poems simply by thinking them. She thinks the poems without bothering to write them down, without bothering to look for publication. Despite releasing about 70 poetry collections, I could see myself going down this path. After all, poems should evaporate to be replaced with the poetry that was their impetus and, after the writing, their effect. I didn’t expect to find poetics like a ribbon traversing the pages. What a beautiful and poetic mind Linda Ty-Casper bears.

So we come to this point of Linda Ty-Casper’s life. She turns 94 years old as this essay is published. She’s told me she won’t be writing again. And here I am wondering what would have happened if she’d written more poems after “Running Secretly, Singing”

Still, my question is a matter of curiosity rather than a second-guessing of her choices. Because one cannot question the immensity of her literary achievements. As a novelist, she didn’t just look back at history but looked at the structure of history itself—how history is made and written, and vice versa. As Charles Samuya Veric writes about her in a recent article for Philippine Esquire, Linda Ty-Casper wrote as “someone who had lived under three flags from the time when the Philippines was an American colony, to the Japanese occupation, to the independence from the US, to the parade of tumultuous decades after 1946—from Martial Law to EDSA Revolution, the centennial of Philippine Independence to EDSA Dos, Typhoon Yolanda to the reign of Rodrigo Duterte, to finally the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos, Jr.”

Linda Ty-Casper gave the gift of her attention, not just to herself but to the Philippines. How can one question that when—during her writing life as well as through to today—the Philippines so needed and needs the clarifying brightness of her attention’s light? Can we advance well without knowing ourselves—can a nation? Linda Ty-Casper’s writings are a source of much-needed light.

Ultimately, therefore, we can only celebrate Linda Ty-Casper’s life and writing life as it has unfolded. Moreover, as a poet, I happen to believe that just one poem can make a poet’s entire life worthwhile.** Fortunately, Linda Ty-Casper’s poem “Running Secretly, Singing” is also that type of one poem. This one poem is worthy enough to give this author another title: Poet.

Footnotes:

* I am reminded of something Jose Garcia Villa once said: I used to think poetry should sing; now I think they should think [paraphrased]. Of course, the matter is not a binary, but I believe the poem is better by being intelligent.

** Despite a lifetime of writing, poets can become known for just one poem. But many if not most poets will never come up with that one poem that will mark their legacy as a “keeper” to a widespread audience. Notable examples include William Carlos Williams for "The Red Wheelbarrow"; Angela Manalang Gloria for “Revolt From Hymen”; Ezra Pound for “In a Station of the Metro”; Aram Saroyan for “lighght”; Robert Frost for “The Road Not Taken”; and Emily Dickinson for “Because I could not stop for Death,” among others.

*****

Eileen R. Tabios has released over 70 books of poetry, fiction, essays, visual art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the poetry collection Engkanto in the Diaspora; novel The Balikbayan Artist; art monograph Drawing Six Directions; autobiography, The Inventor; and a flash fiction collection collaboration with harry k stammer, Getting To One. Other recent books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times which was subsequently translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon; poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; and two French books, PRISES(Double Take) (trans. Fanny Garin) and La Vie erotique de l’art (trans. Samuel Rochery. Her body of work includes invention of the hay(na)ku, a 21^st century diasporic poetic form; the MDR Poetry Generator that can create poems totaling theoretical infinity; the “Flooid” poetry form that’s rooted in a good deed; and the monobon poetry form based on the monostich. She also has edited or conceptualized 16 anthologies of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including HUMANITY, Hay(na)ku 15, BABAYLAN: An Anthology of Filipina and Filipina American Women Writers, and BLACK LIGHTNING: Poetry in Progress. Translated into 13 languages, she has seen her writing and editing works receive recognition through awards, grants and residencies. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com

Linda Ty Casper: