t's really metaphoric. He says that he can see the blue winning...

and then later the pink

winning....but he's happiest seeing the pink and blue work together and win together
Source:
-NeeNa N
Asker's rating & comment

well, at least you HAVE an idea. The critics who read it gave a few ideas:
-It is about the sunset (the pink and blue counterpointing
-It is about praying
-(the best for last) it is about sex

the author is Jose Garcia Villa.
I have observed pink monks eating blue raisins.
And I have observed blue monks eating pink raisins.
Studiously have I observed.

Now, this is the way a pink monk eats a blue raisin:
Pink is he and it is blue and them pink
Swallows the blue. I swear this is true.

And the way a blue monk eats a pink raisin is this:
Blue is he and it is pink and the blue
Swallows the pink. And this also is truth.

Indeed I have observed and Myself have partaken
Of blue and pink Raisins. But my joy was different:
My joy was to see the blue and the pink counterpointing.

Translated By: H. Francia

Napagmasdan ko ang mga rosas na monghe habang kinakain ang mga bughaw na pasas.
At napagmasdan ko ang mga bughaw na monghe habang kinakain ang mga rosas na pasas.
Mingat kong napagmasdan.

Ngayon, ganito kung paano ang isang rosas na monghe ay kainin ang isang bughaw na pasas:
Rosas siya at ito ay bughaw at ang rosas
Ay nilulon ang bughaw. Isinusumpa ko na ito ay totoo.

At kung paano ang isang bughaw na monghe ay kainin ang isang rosas na pasas ay ganito:
Bughaw siya at ito ay rosasat ang bughaw
Ay nilulon ang rosas. At ito ay katotohanan din.

Tunay ngang napagmasdan ko at ako mismo ay nakabahagi
Sa mga bughaw at rosas na pasas. Ngunit ang tuwa ko ay naiba:
Ang aking tuwa ay ang makita ang bughaw at ang rosas na nagsasabayan

He's seen blue swallowing up pink, and pink swallowing up blue, but he likes to see the two
sitting together.
(Reply) (Thread)
Maybe. Did pink and blue have the same gendered connotations in the time and place the poem was
written?

A bit of Googling shows me that the poem was collected in 1942, and therefore written no later than
that. I think pink wasn't considered a feminine color in the west till after WW2.
..where possibly the "pill" means "the poet's own gender identification." (As an alternative to the
bisexual orgies theory above.)
Sorry - not as in "you may not know", but rather "holy cats!". My bad.

I would take it as a genderified thing. And so it would be that the monks accepted the opposite gender
as a part of themselves, but the author enjoyed the interplay of the societal gender roles.
The way it seems to me is:
I've seen women trying to be masculine
and men trying to be feminine

When a woman tries to be masculine, she incorporates the masculinity into herself, but she is still a
woman.

When a man tries to be feminine, he incorporates the femininity into himself, but he is still a man.

I have tried to understand both genders, but I prefer to see men and women being men and women
together.
i have encountered this when i was in college.And a good literature professor explained this is about the
euphoria of seeing the sky as the day ends..how the sky changes its hues and how the two colors meet
in the horizon as the end of day breaks--i know mostly we see the sky to be yellowish orange when the
sun sets.. but i have seen this sky bout a few times in my lifetime (blue skies with a hint of pink and
purples)and i did enjoy looking at it.. and maybe that is the same reason and the same feeling why the
author was able to write it

Last night, July 31, a luminous full moon loomed in the horizon just as the sun was setting. I
had a passing chance to capture the moment because a Divine Hand guided me to glimpse the
sky and chase the moon.

Thoughts of a poem by Jose Garcia Villa "I saw blue monks eating pink raisins" tickled my
memory bank. Many moons ago, as a callow youth in FEU I had read in the Free Press Magazine
an erudite interpretation of JG Villa's famous poem as representing the sunset eating pink raisins
and vice versa, pink monks eating blue raisins as sunrise. In a subsequent chance encounter with
JG, I waxed effusive about this writer's mind-sight into JG's poem, whereupon JG glared at me
with raised eyebrows and said very quietly:
"When I wrote that poem, I saw blue monks eating pink raisins!"

Enjoy the moonrise. Ignore the blue monks eating pink raisins.
Jos Garca Villa Essay - Critical Essays
Analysis
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Both Jos Garca Villas admirers and his detractors agree on the essential inwardness of his
poetry. For the latter, this is a symptom of narcissism hardly useful to the urgent needs of a
newly independent nation. For the former, it is a sign of a transcendent mysticism whose
universality should be given priority over nationalism. The poet himself declared that he was not
at all interested in externals, nor in the contemporary scene, but in essence. His dominant
concern was not description but metaphysics, a penetration of the inner maze of humankinds
identity within the entire mystery of creation.
The poems themselves, however, often suggest something less than such perfection and therefore
something more exciting: purification-in-process, the sensual nature in humans struggling to
survive transfiguration. The body strains to avoid emasculation even as the spirit ascends.
Consequently, the flesh seems glorified, although not in any ordinary spiritual manner that would
diminish the splendor of the sense. Sitwell, in her preface to The American Genius (1951), refers
to this paradox as an expression of absolute sensation, mingling a strange luminosity with a
strange darkness. Villa himself best epitomized the blinding heat of this attempted fusion by
repeatedly adopting the persona/pseudonym Doveglion: a composite Dove-eagle-lion.
Many Voices and Poems by Doveglion
Even the ordinary early poems, replete with piety and puppy love and first gathered in Many
Voices, then in Poems by Doveglion, occasionally manage to move the imagination toward the
outermost limits of language, a crafted inarticulateness conveying the inexpressible. When he
was seventeen, Villa could compare the nipple on the coconut with a maidens breast, and
drink from each; but later lyrics match God and genius, both suffering The ache of the unfound
love and, in their lonely perfection, left contending for primacy with each other. For Villa, these
maturer poems were also the first attempts to create by wordplay, combining brilliance and/
consecration. A romantic vocabulary emerges, repeated like a code or incantation: star, wind,
birds, roses, tigers, dark parts, the sun, doves, the divine. More experimentally, he inverted
phrases and therefore logic, in expectation of profound meaning beyond the rational. He wrote,
Tomorrow is very past/ As yesterday is so future and Your profundity is very light./ My
lightness is very profound. Above all, he is trying to announce me: I am most of all, most.
The defiant rebel who was his own cause begins to be apparent in these poems published in the
Philippines.
Have Come, Am Here
Even as Many Voices and Poems by Doveglion were going to press, however, his experiments
had taken a quantum leap forward. When Sylvia Townsend Warner came to New York in 1939
as Britains delegate to the Third Congress of American Writers, she was astounded by the
verses being prepared for Have Come, Am Here, which included the best of Villas previous
work and much more. It was two years later that the book reached the hands of Sitwell, whose
eyes fell on the poem My most. My most. O my lost!, a brief litany of the protagonists
terrible Accost with God; she was moved by its ineffable beauty. The volume is a mixture of
adoring love lyrics and joyous, combative rivalry with God. To convey their strange
luminosity, she felt compelled to make comparisons with the religious ecstasies of William
Blake and Jakob Boehme, as well as with such other mystics as Saint Catherine of Genoa and
Meister Eckhart.
It was a matter of special pride for Villa to note that in six of his poems, he introduced a wholly
new method of rhyming which he called reversed consonance. As he explained it, a rhyme for
near would be run, green, reign, with the initial n-r combination reversed in each instance.
Such a rhyme, of course, is visible if the reader has been forewarned, but even then the ear can
hardly notice the event. Still, the device is one more variation among Villas many attempts,
through decreation and reassemblage, to penetrate the energy fields of convention and release
explosive forces from the very depths of Being, as Sitwell puts it. Much more interesting,
however, and more successful than reversed consonance in satisfying this quest for fire is the
inexorable forward force of both his love lyrics and his divine poems. Occasionally these
poems are indistinguishable from one another because the protagonist addresses both his beloved
and his God with the same possessive, mastering rhetoric: Between Gods eyelashes I look at
you,/ Contend with the Lord to love you. . . . At times in compulsive narcissism, the protagonist
even treats them as mirrors for himself, then briefly relents, guiltily considering himself to be
Lucifer or Judas. Such interplays of ambiguity are made inevitable by the poems brevity and
density, the constant ellipses and startling juxtapositions: oranges and giraffes, pigeons and
watermelons, yellow strawberries, pink monks eating blue raisins, the crucified Christ as
peacock, the wind shining and sun blowing.
Sometimes in these poems, one can recognize the synesthesia of the French Symbolists,
Cummingss curtailments of standard grammar, Blakean nature as divine emblems, or the
equivalent of cubist/Surrealist transformations of reality. Mostly, however, Villa was an original.
One senses in him a compelling inner necessity to prove that purity proceeds from the proper
combination of what are normally considered impurities. His was the rebels revenge against
mediocrity, a Promethean ascent-in-force to regain godhead. Fellow poet Rolando Tinio, in
Brown Heritage (1967), says that Villa speaks of God becoming Man and concludes that Man
has become God. Villas countrymen grudgingly accepted his preeminence abroad. Villa,
however, always thought of himself as too exceptional to be a...


Wondering whether this photo was taken on a sunset, or a sunrise I wasnt sure really but I
dealt to believe that this was a sunset. All the colors, the silent shore, the blue monks eating pink
raisins scene and the feeling it felt like sunset.
Only to have that ow! moment and realize that I took this photo on a sunrise in Mactan! I was
asleep the sunset before this sunrise that would made it impossible for me to capture the see
and the sun.
This is a sunrise!
Perspectives made me realize to move forward today, Sunday, August 11, 2013. How I see
things is what I would believe it is. I want to see it in a different light this time, and I choose to
start by forgiving myself. By accepting that I had done horrible things that hurt, that made people
I love feel bad
It took me awhile to figure out that I am missing a lot since I chose to live in perpetual darkness;
vowing to feel indifferent.
And I believe its time I should move forward and remember how live the life I wanted (and
still want) for myself.

Maria, I am forgiving you. You should start looking at the brighter side!