The Story of Bani

I. In the Beginning

I was serious at
Eighteen, young love or flirting
She was seventeen
She lived in style at
Wilson and Forbes, in Paris
Long ago, like this
The color of death
Is white, not black -- when I saw
Snowfall in Tokyo
My heart and world to give her
Sayang, no fare to get there

II. The Blue Sword

[Here's a rough translation of ten lines of calligraphy Lanshan wrote and sent to Hanako just before sailing away with Limahong to start his banishment]
My Flower, farewell
No sad smiles or death for now
Sounded is the bell
Let tears soothe your coming years
As I fight past death and fears
Grieving and apart
Much life is still before us
Ever fresh our past
Despite tears, look up at night
Our love's there, among the stars

[Here's what he wrote and inserted in the logbook of Limahong's ship before one of many sea battles]
 
If this be the last
Thank you, my Flower
For your deep love from the start
Despite disaster
For fate that forced us apart
For words, our past, warfare's art
Into this battle
I'm free and humble, death stares
And sees it's settled
I know we'll become
The story of each other
Through time, forever

[More than four hundred years later, the Blue Sword's distant descendant -- called the Blue Ninja -- wrote the following  after I narrated the dream series]

But this is too sad,
said the girl whom I loved
the most.
He must have returned,
in dreams and in reality.
And so I journeyed again
in the past and in the regions
of recurrent dreams...
Many Years Later

Before Blue Sword died
He sailed to her sweet island
The past had not lied
His frail ship at last arrived
Their tale again unfolded
He kissed Hanako
In the dream where love began
Many years ago
Star shards on them were falling
No world, no death, no ending

III. The Heart of Absence

Yes, that's right. Absence
Makes the heart grow fonder.
But prolonged absence
May lose a heart completely.
And twice it happened to me.
Went away, was gone too long;
Then I to them, they to me,
Alas, after all that time,
We didn't anymore belong.
So I learned it -- hah!
Invisibility, and the
Craft of dramatic absence --
And turned into a Ninja.

P.S.

In my Ninja tale
I'm always with Hanako
Just by setting sail
And there it doesn't matter
The madness, war, no money
Distances, illness later
Transcendence keeps the story
What matters really
How I remember -- her face
Friendly skies, the sea...


Bani has presented to us his story.  A trilogy.

What story? you ask. Because what you see are verses. Seven of them.

But do we have to count? Will counting verses give me a clue to understanding the story of Bani? The verses sound nice. I sense a poignant love story. But I fail to contrive an image from all the poetry.

I had the same predicament and suffered the pain of inadequacy to find the plot.

Why does Bani have to be so profound and present his life in an art form so consummate?

It’s because he is Bani, sometimes known as Julian Teodoro C. Lansang. Bani is also Bani Gitano, Bani Tzigani, but he prefers to be called Bani, the Blue Ninja. They all reflect a nebulous time, an ancient place and a romantic circumstance.

I have always believed that a poet should never be asked to explain his poetry. A reader takes a voyage with the poet in his ship to a storyland beautiful and sad.

In another time, I was told:  One must live in the poet’s heart. Then one will understand.

In many places made distant by time and sea, Bani lives. You talk to him in flesh and blood today, 2009, yet you listen to him from a great distance in time. Bani today is his ancestor reincarnate, traveling along the edge of time, reliving, completing what began long ago, returning to a love long lost in far away Nipponland, in Paris sometimes, and in the shadows of the Caucasus. Still longing for a sweet island in a familiar sea, where his story will find home and his winding memories will merge with the present and the ancient.

There’s the rub. Bani tells his story as he awakes from his dreams, where live his beginnings. The ancient ninja wrenched away from Hanako, his Flower, and Lan Shan, the corsair, harking back to a love while in battle, yet here and now, today, absence, not war and wide continent had split the hearts.

But, always, the gray-haired warrior dreams farther back into much older times. Although remembrance and what was past fly in a spiral beyond time, and the enduring dream is what is now, the present.

Bani says this is transcendence, liberating oneself from the prison that is the biological body, defeating time that limps with age. The only truth is an undying Flower, the sweetness of three kisses, a ninja no longer invisible, just a weary mariner in his last odyssey to find the island charted in his memory, which are all and all, after all the eons, rain and snow, in spite the expanding sea.

Read on. Sail on. The far off sweet island beckons.

---ooOoo--

In my story
Soon, before I died
I sailed to your sweet island
The past had not lied

My frail ship at last arrived
The tale again unfolded

Once more I kissed you
In the dream where love began
Many years ago

Star shards on us were falling
No world, no death, no ending

~ Julian Teodoro Lansang ~ 
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