My photo
ALBERT B. CASUGA, a Philippine-born writer, lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, where he continues to write poetry, fiction, and criticism after his retirement from teaching and serving as an elected member of his region's school board. He was nominated to the Mississauga Arts Council Literary Awards in 2007. A graduate of the Royal and Pontifical University of St. Thomas (now University of Santo Tomas, Manila. Literature and English, magna cum laude), he taught English and Literature (Criticism, Theory, and Creative Writing) at the Philippines' De La Salle University and San Beda College. He has authored books of poetry, short stories, literary theory and criticism. He has won awards for his works in Canada, the U.S.A., and the Philippines. His latest work, A Theory of Echoes and Other Poems was published February 2009 by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. His fiction and poetry were published by online literary journals Asia Writes and Coastal Poems recently. He was a Fellow at the 1972 Silliman University Writers Workshop, Philippines. As a journalist, he worked with the United Press International and wrote an art column for the defunct Philippines Herald.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

NEW POEMS; A SEASON'S FIRST HARVEST (JANUARY TO APRIL, 2010)

(Photo courtesy of Bobby Wong)



Last January 30, 2010, I collected the poems I had written in the latter part of 2009 and labelled the collection of new poems “New Poems: An Early Harvest”. I thought it was an archival strategy that would make it easy for me to track my output. I find that it is more than a strategy; it has, in fact, goaded me to write poems as often as I could clear the cobwebs between my ears. It is an efficient way of collecting the poems when publishers send feelers for “new work.” Hence, this new set of poems that marks Earth events and the intractable habit of creating benchmarks out of the grand spurs that keep the mind awake when all it wants now is to slumber.

EARTH POEMS AND OTHERS:
A SEASON’S FIRST HARVEST, NEW POEMS,
(JANUARY TO APRIL, 2010)

HAITI POEMS

1. ALIVE IN HAITI

PORT-AU-PRINCE --- French rescuers pulled a teenage girl...very dehydrated, with a broken left leg and moments from death...from the rubble of a home near the destroyed St. Gerard University on Wednesday (January 27). a stunning recovery 15 days after an earthquake devastated the city...Darlene Etienne, 17, was rushed to a field hospital...groaning through an oxygen mask with her eyes open in a lost stare. ---The Toronto Star, January 28, 2009, Catastrophe in Haiti.

DARLENE ETIENNE, 17

How will your story be told, Du-du cheri,
Without the Lazarus lore tacked on it,
Limbs now freed of crucifying rubble?
In the terrifying gloom of broken days
Or broken nights, whichever endless waking
Found a harbour from pain, wherever fear
Dragged you to a cliff where you could smell
The brine of the bay and hear the muffled
Urgency of a gecko's staccato counting time
Where time sits still between shadows seen
Through cracked spaces and ebbing groans,
Did you cry for a little more time, pray for
A little more light, sing childhood lullabies
Or whistle for the wind: Mon Dieu, a cri d'couer,
A lonely whisper echoing from walls fallen
In other rooms, other voices hushed in silent
Anger: O, St. Gerard, O, Mother of God,
Salve, salve, salve. Seigneur, Mon Dieu! Salve!

But you have become like your shattered country,
Darlene --- these wounds shall not hurt you,
Like La Belle Haiti endured the penury lashed deep
Upon the gnarled backs of peons singing creole
Songs in the wind-swept canefields verdant
With razor-edged leaves that hide their tears
From their carousing children who would one day
See a Haiti free, Le Isle de Hispaniola an isle
Shorn of the filthy gens d'armes, the rowdy Yanqui,
And Mon Dieu, from the ladrones of the Spanish
Galleon who harvested both garlic and gold,
Or traded peons young and old for pesetas to lick
The fetid hands of donnas, duennas, damas
Y caballeros sin caballos, sin verguenza, y
Todos barbaros de Francia, Espana, y America!
Basta ya, basta ya, las barbaridades!

The shackles of this temblor will not hurt you,
Darlene, but the garrottes of freedom will;
We know them now as dollars and cents, tourists
and tourism, just as your people paid back the Yanqui
Ransom that freed you from France, only to be yoked
By French-manqué Duvaliers, or defrocked friars
Like Aristide --- horsemen of your apocalypse
That straddles your country's hills and laves your
Haiti's beaches and shores. To be free is to be enslaved.

But was your lost stare a confused reckoning
Of new found puissance? These rubble shall not bury
You, cheri, for you will rise scarred but ramrod certain
That rancour nurtured well in your heart and soul
For this rapier from Reapers unknown will invigorate you.
Though ripped and routed and retreating into some hell,
Your people will learn to rule
A haven For Haitians, as Haiti is for Haitians,
And temblors be damned.

Mississauga, January 28, 2010


2. A DEATH IN HAITI

FABIANNE GEISMAR, 15

Shot dead for stealing mirrors.
---Headline, The Toronto Star, Catastrophe in Haiti, Jan 20, 2009, Pg. 19


While the temblor's carrion burn
in common graves unnamed,
you have a name to go by, and
will have confreres wail to mourn
your falling on brittle rubble,
mirror clutched as you would a rag doll
if you had a more innocent childhood,
if you even were a lass in pigtails
or braids or ribbons or princess veils,
and did not have to scrounge for food
or even think that a purloined mirror
is a prize too precious to die for.

O, Fabianne, would you have seen
a flushed reflection of the fairest face
this wounded city has haplessly hidden
in unforgiving debris of shattered grace?
Or would you have recoiled from scars
on scars that faces become inured to
seen through cracks of shattered mirrors?

Mississauga, January 21, 2010


ZEIT SCHINDEN

It is a poet's constant dread. The poem will be stillborn. So one plays for time. Wait for the surprise that creation is. One recalls the decapitated Orpheus nailed on the lyre, singing still. There must be a song arrested in his throat. The poet plays for time, a zeit schinden. Sometimes, the poem dies in the waiting.

If playing for time is idleness regained,
a game of dunking Orpheus’ head
in a pot of boiling water would indeed
buy us the song screaming to drown
silences that are midwives to poems.
Did not the head nailed to the lyre
sing still of the beauty that was Greece?
What does it matter that limbs are shorn
from limbs in prurient violence?
A paean in darkened rooms is still pain
that seeks its balm in threnodies
muted now as dirges for the final quiver
of the song arrested in his throat,
a stillborn sigh that could have been
the dying gurgle of our descending
into a sandbox of absent games
and players gone and quietness fallen.

Mississauga, February 20, 2010


A BALLERINA ON THE WINDOW

(For my ballerinas: Chloe, Sydney, and Taylor)

“Adios, adios, abuelo. Te Amo. Je T’aime! Mahal Kita! Luv ya!”
---- Chloe speaking in tongues.

A glimmer of a sylph on the gossamer bay,
She pirouettes and is gone into her chrysalis
Not unlike the sylvan truants that waylay
The wary wanderer among the trees,

Or the papillon flitting from blossom to bramble,
Hidden but always there, some surprise grace,
A magical fairy light to dispel the creeping pall
Coiled on the winter ennui of fallen days ---

O, she dandles dearly with her ragged ragdoll,
Caressingly delicate in a wistful pas de deux
Of her shadow Fonteyn caught in a sudden fall
By a prancing Baryshnikov vaulting off the shadow.

Was that his pas de chat to snatch her from disaster?
Quickly now, urgently now, hold the hapless Dame
As would a cat curl on the legs of its Master,
Dream now of a demure pas de bourree of fame,

While dreams still enthrall, while the dancing
Is still your language of love, of boundless courage,
While the arguments of your young body moving
To the beats of passion are still the true language

Of the good, the honest, and the beautiful:
Until then, mon amour, these decrepit hands cannot
Stop the deluge of fear, of hurt, and of the frightful
That would drown us all, before our windows are shut.

Even now, as you wave from your window,
I know you will be brave.

Mississauga, February 9, 2010


A LULLABY

Rock-a-bye, baby, on the treetop,/ When the wind blows, the cradle will rock;/When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall/ And down will come baby, cradle, and all!
--- Lullaby


1.
Close your eyes and fairy lights will lead you
Away from the dark and gloom that scare you:

In your dreams, do you run through brackish snow?
Climb leafless trees or swing from a broken bough?

Where the river bends, do you gather rotting fish,
Glean carrion snagged in a summer’s fishing mesh?

Has the snowman’s head fallen off its melting body?
Its stick hands twisted like pretzels. Arrows really.

The carrot nose has become its stabbing tooth,
Where both eyes were, now Cyclops orb is left

On a conehead of dripping snow; a crushed face
Stares blankly at a mid-day sun whose lapping rays

Forebode another season for yet another reason
To accept that what lives is also ripe for destruction.

(O, my aching heart, it aches, it hurts,
It hurts badly, it hurts to the core.
Kindly spare me your gentle nurture,
For I dread death’s coming spectre.)*

2.

Close your eyes and let the wind rip through
Tears and cracks and cranny and broken doors, too.

Grip the tightened string on your wayward kite,
No wind could wreck nor snap it loose from flight.

You will ride the wind, my boy, and touch the sun,
Though frightful prayers plead that you must run

From the dreams that have become nightmares,
From the fallen kites; run from the fearsome snares.

Life is a trap, much like the burlap waiting downstream,
When you get there, you are enmeshed -- do not scream.

It is too late to scream. Close your eyes, shut them tight.
Life is not a waking dream. You have just begun to fight.

(O, my aching heart, it aches, it hurts,
It hurts badly, it hurts to the core.
Kindly spare me your gentle nurture,
For I dread death’s coming spectre.)*

Mississauga, March 3, 2010

_____________

* Annnay, pusok, annay, annay,
Nasaem, naut-ut la unay.
Itdem kaniak ta pannaranay
Ta kaasiak a maidasay.

--- Duay-ya: Dungdungwen Kanto
(A Lullaby of Love), Ilocano Lullaby Refrain


A CRUISE FARE: THE VIEUX MADAME, 84

She held on to the shorter side of her skirt,
a Creole form of rainbow radiance raw on rays,
and took the proffered hand with a shy smile.

Her descent is uneventful save for all the eyes
riveted on her, the sole fare from an island shore
where fishermen glean enmeshed smelt
on day-long-heaved nets hitched to catamarans
docking light with empty baskets from a sea
that is now without fish or even fishermen.

To banter from ferry passengers tendered
ashore from cruising ocean liners, she mutters:
En Français, s’il vous plait. Non parle Anglais.

The boatswain gently cautions her to mind
the gangplank shuffle: Regardez ca!
On parle de vous, Madame.
Amused, she responds : Pourquoi pas ?
En fin, a quatre-vingts, gens remarquez!

They saw her looking away into that vast sea,
a half-smile cancelling a frown on her face,
quite like wishing away an unwanted memory.

Parlez-moi de votre voyage, mon cher,
the proffered hand asks past the gangplank.
En Anglais, mon ami: Et ees a long journée,
she says, pointing her cane rapier-like
to some lost horizon. Un voyage solitaire.

She laughs weakly, whispering:
Alors, Monsieur, a la prochaine. Bon chance!
She pulls her wind-blown skirt down and giggles.

Mississauga, April 10, 2010


UMBERTO AND EDO DE BRAZIL

It rained at the Grand Anse beach in Grenada.
--- Writer’s Notebook on the Cruise

Hurriedly, furtively putting on her top piece,
she looked triumphantly nubile coming out
of the make-do change nook of towels held
by her Umberto to hide her from sparse beach
traffic gaze --- gauche stares from a hawker
of fun would have been de rigueur in Rio
when they were young, but she must now
twist and turn to cover a sag-here a bag-there:

El triumfo de vejez! Nuestra juventud perdida!
Aiee, que lastima! Aiee, hermosura perdida!

She would have wept, but the Viejo beside her,
is once again her swain, coaxing her: Venga!
is all she needed to rush into the lapping waves.
Venga! Queridisima mia! A lass again, halloing
again at the water’s bite: Come, Umberto! Come!

But the mountain cloud bringing the first rain
after a searing summer has overtaken her glee:
Lluvia! Lluvia! She cried, bewailing the sudden
leeward burst. Bolting out of the roiled sea,
no longer Venus-like, she scampered --- her
caballero in tow --- to the thatched shed,
pell-mell shelter from an abrupt summer rain.

Was it the surprise of a wayward downpour
stopped her from her frolic in the sea?
Or was it the intruding pall ruined her mark
of the sun, gone from the sky, gone from the sea?
Lluvia! Lluvia! She warned anyone who cared
to listen --- the beach frolic rolled unabated.

Under the windblown shelter, she asked him:
Por que? Dime, amor mio, por que hace llover
cuando estamos contento con poquito alegre?
Con poquito de luz del sol? Con tiempo poquito?

He shrugged as he shook the water off his ears.
Put your clothes on, Edo. The rain won’t stop,
might have been what he wanted to say when
she asked: Why must it rain when all we need
Is a little sunshine? In such a short short while?


Mississauga, Ontario, April 13, 2010

(During the first week of April, diluvial floods have wrecked communities in Rio, Brazil, where Umberto and Edo must have gone back to after the cruise. The killer floods and landslides were caused by torrential rains.

Edo’s Lluvia! Lluvia! warning is worth heeding.

In the Philippines, a recent situs for killer floods, (now ironically widespread drought throughout the archipelago) schoolchildren have been taught to chant the English ditty once again: “Rain rain, go away! Come again another day. Little children want to play.” You know, just in case Yahweh understands English only.


The rain becomes a bloody plot. --- ABC)


CRUISE FARES 3: HOLOCAUST IN MY MIND

Yobo of Sarnia, Ontario, Canada

“In ascending steep climbs, the Himalayan Sherpas hold each other on the shoulder in a single file; you know, it somehow energizes them.” – Yobo while climbing the Georgetown Fort in Grenada


“Sich falsche Hoffnungen machen,” he muttered absently,
looking for an excuse to be on top of a hill housing a dungeon.

Remnants of a lookout point, the Fort stands now for an illusion:
safe from the marauders, safe from the ogres of conquest,
here remains a craven rock of futile defence from the claws
of Empires that came to save settlers from voodoo and disease
in the name of God and country, hope for the hoffnungsvoll,
a new world where the old is a detritus of violence and greed.

“I am a castaway child of the Holocaust, and I remember:
no dungeons or chambers shall cut us down wherever we go,
our best revenge is to thrive at any time in any clime in any place
where we find ourselves derided, denied, and defeated;
it is only the hoffnunglos, who must inherit the wind,
my people will always build the lighthouse on the knoll.
Like the Sherpas on the Everest, we hold each other‘s back
ascending, we lend each other strength until the very end.”

Muttering, Yobo of Sarnia, man of means, absently
looked down the cliff and claimed: “Ich auch eigen der Welt unter.
No one will take it away from me. Ever. Pardon my Deutsch,
Monsieur,
but habits die hard and tongues get twisted."

Mississauga, April 16, 2010


CRUISE FARES 3: HOLOCAUST IN MY MIND (A QUICK REVISION AND AFTERTHOUGHT)

Yobo of Sarnia

“In ascending steep climbs, the Himalayan Sherpas hold each other on the shoulder in a single file; you know, it somehow energizes them.” – Yobo, while climbing the Georgetown Fort in Grenada


“Sich falsche Hoffnungen machen,”
he muttered absently,
looking for an excuse to be on top
of a hill housing a dungeon.

Remnants of a lookout point,
the Fort stands now for an illusion:
safe from the marauders,
safe from the ogres of conquest,
here remains a craven rock
of futile defence from the claws
of Empires that came to save settlers
from voodoo and disease
in the name of God and country,
hope for the hoffnungsvoll,
a new world where the old
is a detritus of violence and greed.

“I am a castaway child
of the Holocaust, and I remember:
no dungeons or chambers
shall cut us down wherever we go;
our best revenge is to thrive
at any time in any clime in any place
where we find ourselves
derided, denied, and defeated;
it is only the hoffnunglos
who must inherit the wind;
my people will always build
the lighthouse on the knoll;
like the Sherpas on the Everest,
we hold each other‘s back
ascending, we lend each other
strength until the very end.”

Muttering, Yobo of Sarnia, man of means,
absently looked down the cliff and claimed:
“Ich auch eigen der Welt unter.
No one will take it away from me. Ever.
Pardon my Deutsch, Monsieur,
but habits die hard and tongues get twisted."


(Rewritten from its first version Cruise Fares 3: Holocaust in my Mind, the version above cuts the lines shorter to objectify the rhythm of the ascent on Fort George which remains on a cliff overlooking the capital city of Grenada in the Caribbean. It should suggest the breathing of the climbers as they strain to reach the top of the hill. Is this a better version?)



IF: AN EARTH DAY POEM

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,/And life is too much like a pathless wood.../I’d like to get away from earth a while/And then come back to it and begin over.../...Earth’s the right place for love:/I don’t know where it’s likely to go better. --- Robert Frost, Birches


1.

If you marvelled at the dance of the Northern Lights
Counterpointing the smouldering plumes of ashen smoke
Billowing out of an Eyjafjallajokull cradled by melting glacier,

Or quietly scanned the opal horizons of Banda Aceh swathed
In a glorious sunset chiaroscuro before the waves claimed
Atolls and infants back into the rip tide roar of that tsunami;

If you were ambushed by an unforgiving temblor that rocked
Haiti out of its romping in reggae regaled beaches turned
Into common graveyards of carrion crushed under rubble;

If you have walked through cherry-blossom-strewn streets
And smiled at strangers’ hallooing: How about this spring?
Before rampaging twister funnels crushed hearths and homes;

If you have strolled and danced ragtime beat on Orleans’
Roadhouses rocking rampant with rap and razzmatazz
Before Katrina’s wrath wreaked hell’s hurricane havoc;

If you braved the stygian stink of Ilog Pasig and sang songs
While harvesting floating tulips, debris, or stray crayfish
For some foregone repast before it turned into River Styx;

If you have lived through these and now blow fanfare
For Earth’s being the right place for love or maybe care,
You might yet begin to accept that mother’s lullabies were
Also her gnashing of teeth when you wailed through nights
When slumber would have allowed her love not tantrums
Of infants grown now and “quartered in the hands of war”:


2.

How else explain the wrath of days descending
Not into quietness but pain? Has she not kept her anger
In check for all the tantrums of the Ages: Thermopylae,
Masada, Ilium, Pompeii? Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nagasaki?
Stalin’s pogroms? The death chambers and Holocaust trains?
Polpot’s killing fields in Kampuchea? Rwanda’s genocide?
Before it lured tourist trekkers, the verboten Walls of China?
The Berlin Wall? The Gaza Wall? Fences of n.i.m.b.y.
Neighbours: India and Pakistan, Iran and Iraq, splintered
Korea, the Irelands shorn of the emerald isles, the fractured
United Kingdom where the sun has finally set on its Empire,
The still haemorrhaging American southern states crippled
And still unyoked from black history but seething now
From the African-American’s irascible entitlement ---
With Obama on the rise, they will overcome someday. Soon.


3.

Has it gone any better? Love on this piece of terra infirma?
The man crucified on Golgotha preached love,
And he got killed.
Free the enslaved black man, he cried in Gettysburg,
And he got killed.
The loincloth-clad man asked for non-violent resistance,
And he got killed.
Another Gandhi later, the distaff side, asked for peace,
And she got killed.
The man got his people to the moon, and said:
Ask not what your country can do for you;
Ask what you can do for your country.
And he got killed.
I have a dream. He said that equality of races will ring true,
And he got killed.
Exiled and returning to forge a conscience for his people,
He said the “Filipino is worth dying for”.
And he got killed.


4.

That’s when mother shushed you back to sleep,
An impatient rhythm clipping away what should have been
A gently lulling melody from the Song of Ages:
Rock-a-bye, baby on the treetop; when the wind blows,
The cradle will rock. When the bough breaks, the cradle
Will fall; and down will come baby, cradle, and all.
The bough breaks, and you scream. Too late for that.
This is not a dream. The freefall is mother’s little slip
When she could no longer hold you still, somnolence
Finally taking over, and your cri d’couer, a scream,
For help, for caress, for all the love gone from an empty room.
The cradle falls, she can’t pick it up. Exhausted and utterly
Spent, she mutters in her sleep: Spare the rod, spoil the child.


5.

“An earthquake is expected on the fault lines between Israel
And Palestine”, the breaking news announces another temblor.
Nazareth shrines will be closed to pilgrims. And Jerusalem?
Closed. Gaza? Construction abandoned. Problems solved.
Like the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo drove the Ugly American
From the Philippine’s Clark Air Base where the legions
Of armed rebels, limp politicos, and clap-infected whores
Could not.


6.

Tomorrow, then, the Ring of Fire.


Mississauga, April 26, 2010


SCREAM: A MAGUINDANAO DIRGE*

She lost her rubber slippers in the mud when
Crackling mayhem scuttled their march to town
Ripping through their roaring revelry riding
East of the searing sun: Ibagsak si Ampatuan!
Alive and raucous in their raspy throats, the raw
Mantra of venceremos quickly turned to wailing:

“She was on her way to the village school,
Carrying a new pair of shoes from her mother,
Rosa, who is an OFW in the States! Pobresita,
Eleanor, she needed clean shoes for the prom;
And, O, she laughed about our ragtag band
Marching to a funeral tune, its sole anthem beat.”

She will not find Simeon where she has gone,
Cut down, head cracked, and curled like a limp
Rag doll that could have been whipped away
Even from the tightest hold of a pining swain
Anxious and waiting in the now unlit schoolyard
Marking their first embrace in a lost last dance.

--- ALBERT B. CASUGA
Mississauga, April 29, 2010

* This poem is in collaborative response to the invitation to express rage over the Maguindanao Massacre, that took place in the Southern Philippines in November 2009. It is part of a collection of over a hundred poems collected online under the working title An Anthology of Rage.


Friday, May 21, 2010

PART 3: MAGUINDANAO MASSACRE RAGE POEMS: A REVIEW


CLEANSING HUBRIS WITH POETRY

Why did the Maguindanao Massacre happen? What sort of madness triggered this injurious blight? Man’s inhumanity to man?

Aquino’s playful poem goes to the root of this monstrosity. It is a way of life. It is being consistent to the colonizer’s (Spanish, American, or Japanese) estimate of the Muslims in “far Zamboanga.”

These were the “brown monkeys” who were never conquered. They preserved their way of life. They hoarded their prerogatives to use the land as they found it.

Murder to achieve their objectives? Sure, why not? They will not be denied this birthright. Even if they would not know what to do with it thereafter.

and we will express, always, "give us all
we want, no demand unprovided", though
we have no clue what we'll do thereafter.

Now, this is the rage that is somehow controlled by a making a jester out of the axeman. The murderer is the clown at the party. But rage it still is. Beware the smile of the afflicted, after the grief has subsided. This has always bred the Juramentado: the Mindanao Moro’s version of the suicide bomber or the terrorist manqué. But they aim to kill as many as they could to get to the good side of Allah. Allahu Akhbar!

ALLAN ARNOLD GAMALINDA AQUINO

i was a rain forest mystic, monkey-like,
moving through madness like a typhoon.
i turned my enemies into sloppy, wet cutlets.

i disgraced the spanish majesty with
sticks, rocks, stolen bullets. i defied
god's chosen, believing i'd get away with it.

it took many cannon shells to prove me wrong.
off to the white elysium, a humble student:
it was easy to forget the musty stench of burned villages. . .

* * *

this is how insects are unmade.
while scars remind us the past was real,
they can often be ignored.

and we will express, always, "give us all
we want, no demand unprovided", though
we have no clue what we'll do thereafter.

While Kilates’ poem used the assassin as persona, Alma Anonas-Carpio’s dirge comes out of the laments of the dead. They are the carrion who now bear witness to their wicked fortune.
The rage comes full circle then. If the dead could speak from their graves, they would ask how soon they would be forgotten. Anonas-Carpio, in this unwieldy apostrophe, pours out luridly pricking verbiage that is nevertheless tempered by her focus on the central image --- the protesting dead, the soundlessly raging dead.

Coming full circle to Mila D. Aguilar’s earlier trepidation, Anonas-Carpio is likewise worried by all these protestations. All sound and fury signifying nothing?

Our bodies will rot,/ Our lives may be/ Blown away on cruel winds./ But we will not be forgotten./ We will not let you forget./ They will not let you forget./Not now, Not ever.
So save your condemnations/ For those who can use them. / Condemnations count for nothing/ In a nation that does nothing but condemn.

From this vantage point, I would surmise that Anonas-Carpio would rather have a palpably meaningful retribution like: Shut the f…up! Shape up! You who weep with gnashing teeth. Rise up. Or die trying. Para sa ating Inang Bayan!


ALMA ANONAS-CARPIO

We stare into the sky,
Our eyes clouded and unseeing.
The sky is clear and blue as the ocean
Of justice upon which our paper boat heaves
And tosses, restless and sinking,
The newsprint running like tears
Into water, like widows' mascara
As they sit before our caskets.
Our mouths are frozen open,
Our blood-cry for justice
Will continue to rend the heavens,
Carried by thousands of living voices.
The bloody handprint of impunity
Will not be washed away
Until all the oppressed
Stand and speak,
Demand and win.

*

Now come the condemnations
When we lie bloodied and mutilated,
Staining the crabgrass red
With a rage of silence.

Our eyes stare into the bluest sky
With no one to shut them against the flies
That gather and feast upon our flesh.
We lie here, awaiting
The shock of discovery,

Battered and broken,
Defiled and muddied,
Buried alive, decapitated,
Raped, shot, slashed
And finally silent.

Now come the condemnations
Filling the holes where laws
Should have been firm as mortar
Holding together our dreams,
Keeping us alive, holding off
The hail of bullets and hate.

Our mouths are open,
Yet our words are gone
Who will speak for us?
A thousand more tongues.

Our hands lie shattered,
Belying the peaceful grass beneath.
Who will write our stories?
A million hands reaching across the earth.

There are many things
That can be kept silent,
But not things such as this.

We have kin, brethren by blood,
Brethren by choice.
They will give voice
To our dirge, our plaint,
Our blood-cry for justice.

There is nothing that will
Draw a pall of silence over
The murder of hope.

The grass here will grow green again,
The earth's red will not be of blood
As years pass. New candidates will
Still seek office, new journalists
Will still tell their stories.

Our bodies will rot,
Our lives may be
Blown away on cruel winds.
But we will not be forgotten.
We will not let you forget.
They will not let you forget.
Not now, Not ever.

So save your condemnations
For those who can use them.
Condemnations count for nothing
In a nation that does nothing but condemn.

In light of the cacophonic mix of all this raging, Philippine poetry’s eminence grise, Gemino H. Abad adds his voice:

GEMINO "JIMMY" ABAD

(for Garous Abdolmalekian)

A man falls in the street
will you
at once without hesitation rush
to help
will you
only look to see what may be wrong
consider what help what remedy
will you

*
(For my sons)

Brotherhood, love ---
in life the most precious ...
but in that statement's corral,
the words seem embarrassed,
so bare,
as if stripped and found hollow,
without pith,
and yet, if they were lived,
in the deed the words would shine
and light up their inmost shrine.

While the rage remains unspoken, Abad moves beyond the backhoed common graves. Our best revenge is brotherhood. Love is still the sublimest rage there is.

Beyond the bloodcry of anger lies hope. Hope is still the handmaiden of love. Love conquers all. Ask the Man nailed on that Tree.

Jimmy Abad, the most senior of the poets, sounds most mellow in his rage submission. We, nevertheless, recognize our caveat: Beware the smile on an angry visage.

---oOo---

The Maguindanao Massacre rage poems recreate the energies of poetry as a tool that elicits the cleansing of human hubris which poetry has always been tasked with. It was a source of catharsis in Aristotle’s time, and so have our Balagtasan, Zarzuela, Dan-daniw, Dal-lit, and various other regional poetical jousts --- Joel Pablo Salud through his Anthology of Rage has, willy-nilly, revisited them.

Mabuhay ka, Makatang Salud!

Mississauga, May 2010

Thursday, May 20, 2010

PART 2: MAGUINDANAO MASSACRE RAGE POEMS (A REVIEW)


SOME RAGE POEMS FROM SALUD’S ONLINE ANTHOLOGY
A rage expressed in dripping sarcasm, impunity, and, indeed, disdain (seen from the viewpoint of the assassins,) is Marne L. Kilates' almost immediate contribution to Salud’s call.

It is an apostrophic diatribe fit for Manila’s Plaza Miranda (the Philippine version of Times Square or London’s Trafalgar Square or even Hyde Park) to stir the people into frenzy. It recalls a literary tradition fraught in the zarzuela where poetry is most effective because it is declaimed as rousing elocutions.

One is reminded of attempts staged by Dr. Bienvenido Lumbera to harangue Quiapo’s audiences at Plaza Miranda with his protest poems. The Bulatlat, an online magazine of long standing, has published some of these oral poems of Dr. Lumbera, a Philippine National Artist.

Kilates’ poem recalls the lacerating edge of Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s recitations at the Kremlin Square where, alone, he could drive thousands of people to anger or tears, and to bear arms, with his lyrical descriptions of Gulag’s inhumanity to his peasant brethren.

(Long moribund in the Philippine literary landscape, oral poetry, nevertheless, struggles to exist at this writing. Young writers have not gone past the howls of Ginsberg or the lazy orthographies of e.e.cummings; now, they think rap is au courant; indolence and ignorance of poetics and aesthetic benchmarks make them unreadable. Poetry in English is almost dead or dying in the Philippines.)

Again, with an unexpected twist, it is truly a “soundless scream” to wake up a fence-sitting people from helpless stupor.

MARNE L. KILATES

Out of the shadows, evil speaks...

You don’t count. None of you
Count in the scheme of things.
Not your small bodies or small lives,
Not your whining, despicable
Poverty groveling before our power,
Not your sniveling needfulness
That clutches at the hem of our skirts
And soils the varnish of our floors,
Not your sweaty intrusions that offend
Even our pets, not your unending
Requirements for small change.

No, you don’t count. The scheme
Of things is something you cannot
Understand: Things of magnitude
And consequence are a puzzle to you,
The workings of power you can never
Equate with your pitiful scrambling
For the next meal, the overdue rent,
The unpaid tuition, the humiliation,
The shame, the want. You can only
Understand fear and the weight
Of our power upon your servitude,

The fear of being trampled upon,
Crushed underfoot, buried
In the dirt that you love so much,
In the sod that you mistake for your
Dignity, in the miserable patch
That is your only concept of property.
You can only understand the immediacy
Of death glinting in our loud and
Rumbling machines, our guns
That you thought we wouldn’t use
But did because… You don’t count.
Get out of the way. Disappear. Die.

(Translated to Filipino, this Kilates poem should inflame an audience to take up arms. Verily, the impunity shown the victims is graphic here.)

Philippine Graphic Weekly editor, Inday Espina-Varona’s poem will be recalled again and again by cafe insurgents. Will armchair revolutionaries see the rage behind this Hamletian soliloquy? Will anyone “peek behind the backhoe” and cry: “Havoc! Let slip the dogs of war.”

It is finely crafted poems like Varona’s which will stand the test of time and impatience. Her fear and trembling is occasionally the intelligentsia’s reaction; but beware the dark thoughts that spring from these minds --- theirs is a retaliation that gurgles from the heart and centuries of pent-up anger and unmollified rage.

INDAY ESPINA-VARONA

We wash down fears in brew amid neon’s glare
and now clamp teeth on trembling lips
as fingers press black knobs that pace
the rush of images of flesh and bones and teeth
and hair framed by clumps of earth

Craft flies, deserts us, absconds
in this moment of illogic when the mind
shirks from its normal quest for answers,
dreading the cackle of bloodlust
that awaits the intrepid
that dare peek behind the backhoe.

Luisa Igloria’s ghazal on the Maguindanao Massacre was one of the earliest responses to Salud’s solicitation.

It is the most “soundless scream” of those I have chosen to limn this rage which Mr. Salud would want to preserve not only for the duration of this massacre’s prosecution but for all the literary ages.

An aesthetic exercise, it screams with the fearsome muttering of those body parts, if they could but bear witness to the carnage.

We'll grieve the most for the smallest parts of their mangled
bodies: the tendons of the throat, no longer able to speak of tragedy;

the little finger joints severed beneath the canopy, the wombs
and hips that broke so easily, as if it were no tragedy.

If this is not poetry, what is? If this is not grief, what is? Igloria is a poet of poets.


LUISA IGLORIA

Months after, metallic glimpse of water across low hills
and loosened earth, still shadowed with tragedy.

Salt in the air, every rooftop edged with rust--
Could they have known what portents bloomed with tragedy?

Rip of light caught on the zipper's downstroke.
Who'll sign his name on the bloody breastplate, authoring this tragedy?

Grass strewn with leaves, with limbs. Even birds now skirt
the field. A backhoe, impaled on the outlines of tragedy.

We'll grieve the most for the smallest parts of their mangled
bodies: the tendons of the throat, no longer able to speak of tragedy;

the little finger joints severed beneath the canopy, the wombs
and hips that broke so easily, as if it were no tragedy.

Of the poems sent to Mr. Salud, this Barrett poem (apparently a take off from a corrupted version of the villanelle) intrigues me. It sounds cavalier but it is not; it objectifies the namelessness and insignificance of these lives cut down in a show of unearned power and might. Like Kilates, Kay Ulanday Barrett is angriest when she says: “Do not confuse numbers for bodies,” One dead body is one too many.


These are the hapless who are willing to fight for a spot in this soil, but “like fish scale, they are transparent", seemingly without a tinge of gravitas. The filthy unknown.


Bellies hold breath at a starving neck
A country is a swollen stalk of rage (un)refrained
Never mind, love is contraband sent in envelopes.
How do you pronounce your name & not flinch?


Will they merit love from outraged brethren from the seats of power? Nah. “Love is contraband sent in envelopes.” Corrupt politicians will buy their votes, but “bellies hold breath at a starving neck/ A country is a swollen stalk of rage.”


KAY ULANDAY BARRETT

Your name is transparent
like fish scale, a stretch of
guiltless highway full of traffic.
How do you pronounce your name & not flinch?

Like fish scale, a stretch of
hues: bloodlike, oceanic, rifle metal to a temple
how do you pronounce your name & not flinch?
Do not confuse numbers for bodies.

Hues: bloodlike, oceanic, rifle metal to a temple
Bellies hold breath at a starving neck
Do not confuse numbers for bodies
Never mind, love is contraband sent in envelopes.

Bellies hold breath at a starving neck
A country is a swollen stalk of rage (un)refrained
Never mind, love is contraband sent in envelopes.
How do you pronounce your name & not flinch?



But they are not nameless, nor are they lumpen unwashed. They, too, have names and dreams. And most cogently, screams.


The effort at objectifying a scream of rage required this “alphabet” poem. The three stanzas culled from the initial letters of SCREAM in each line concretize the anguish and the soundless rage over dead dreams, and even young love.


Why be lugubrious when violent anger is apropos?


This is precisely the persuasion of this review: Rage is most pronounced when it is a gurgling in the blood, spewing in one’s breath, in one’s seething recognition of wasted opportunities --- the truncation of youth in such a stupid stupid stupid mishap in the name of a spurious democratic gesture.


Luisa Igloria’s blog Lizard Meanders got me into this poetical collaboration. I do not regret my sending one. It is, however, an effort to inform the exercise with the requirements of poetry lest it becomes a collection of drooling blather signifying nothing; worse, amounting to Mila Aguilar’s fear of “shouting ourselves hoarse, producing nothing.”


ALBERT B. CASUGA


She lost her rubber slippers in the mud when
Crackling mayhem scuttled their march to town
Ripping through their roaring revelry riding
East of the searing sun: Ibagsak si Ampatuan!
Alive and raucous in their raspy throats, the raw
Mantra of venceremos quickly turned to wailing:

“She was on her way to the village school,
Carrying a new pair of shoes from her mother,
Rosa, who is an OFW in the States! Pobresita,
Eleanor, she needed clean shoes for the prom;
And, O, she laughed about our ragtag band
Marching to a funeral tune, its sole anthem beat.”

She will not find Simeon where she has gone,
Cut down, head cracked, and curled like a limp
Rag doll that could have been whipped away
Even from the tightest hold of a pining swain
Anxious and waiting in the now unlit schoolyard
Marking their first embrace in a lost last dance.




(PART 3: MAGUINDANAO RAGE POEMS: COMING FULL CIRCLE)

MAGUINDANAO MASSACRE RAGE POEMS: A REVIEW (PART 1)


The Maguindanao Massacre: An Anthology of Rage
SCREAMS: “SHOUTING OURSELVES HOARSE,
PRODUCING NOTHING”?
It’s past April Fool’s. Someone in the old country is asking poets from all over the cyber world to write a “rage poem” condemning the November 2009 carnage in Maguindanao, a Muslim-dominated province in the Southern Philippines. Why poems instead of armed retaliation? A tad late, isn’t it? Jihad in the name of Allah perhaps?
That’s not funny, you know.
(There, Megan --- one of my granddaughters growing up jaded in Canada --- I’ve used your favourite expression of “rage”, minus the throaty voice!)
When Philippine writer Joel Pablo Salud campaigned through his Facebook last April for “Rage” poems to protest what at that time looked like a government intervention to absolve two of the Ampatuan relatives alleged to have planned the extremely prejudiced elimination of Esmael Mangundadatu as an opposing candidate challenging incumbent Southern Philippines Maguindanao provincial Governor Ampatuan, patriarch of the accused dynasty alleged to be responsible for what is now tagged “Maguindanao Massacre”, it was past April’s Fool day, and it appeared to this writer to be a quixotic albeit heroic attempt to keep the monstrously heinous massacre in the public eye.

--oOo--

A Backgrounder
(The May 2009 elections, by the way, saw Mangundadatu beat the accused political Godfather Ampatuan, who is now in custody in the Philippine capital city of Manila. His wife, Genalyn, was one of the victims of the political mayhem. Press reports earlier identified her as one of those waylaid on their way to town to register the candidacy of her husband. She was also reported to have been shot in her genitals, some companions were raped, a pregnant woman shot in the belly, and youthful members of her entourage decapitated.

Her candidate husband was not with the mowed down group that included at least 30 media functionaries. She was there to make sure her husband’s candidacy was registered. Journalists marched with her to witness what was admittedly a historic challenge to the long-entrenched Ampatuan warlord.

She was the brave one.

As a proper homage to a peremptory oblation, Governor-elect Esmael should --- against all odds or estimates --- become the best provincial executive he could muster. His wife’s sacrifice is worth no less. But to him, paraphrasing Shakespeare in Julius Caesar, “woe to the hands that shed her costly blood./ Over her wounds do I now prophesy/ which like dumb mouths do opt their ruby lips/ domestic fury shall be so in use/ that mothers shall behold their infants quartered in the hands of war.”

He is, after all, only human. Pagkat siya’y tao lamang! The quintessential expression of rage against this patent impunity is Revenge --- good old Talion Law: An eye for an eye! Come to think of it, Shariah, the Islam Law derived from the Qur’an is even harsher than the lex talionis. It advocates immediate, equalizing, justice. None of this oft-postponed, deferred, prolonged investigation, prosecution, trial, and jury determination. Jihad is Allah’s justice.

How long will Ampatuan’s case ripen in the courts of “law”? How many owners of grave-digging backhoe’s need to be determined in Maguindanao? Will witnesses also be eliminated with “extreme prejudice” as the case lolls along in the majestic chambers of learned barristers and the law’s magistrates?

Peace, brotherhood, and prosperity are selfless alternatives and they should properly honour Genalyn’s sacrifice. Her people in Maguindanao have long suffered the grip of feudal warlords who thrive in monstrous mansions while taxpayers lived in shantytowns built atop garbage dumps.

Giving way to murderous and vengeful rage is a base but human reaction, but Esmael, not unlike a Prometheus-bound or the biblical Job, must rise above it all, weep his heart out, but be god-like now, providing the public-service providence his wife’s murder must be enshrined with.

The people must prevail.

Even now, one of the poem-writers, Angela Gutierrez Dy has “chided” Esmael for “hiding behind his wife’s skirt” when she wrote in her Rage contribution: “before you left, your husband Esmael/ received terrible threats. so he sent/ his family’s women, even pregnant,/ in his stead to the election office, to prevent/ his own death. you went, and yet/ none have called him selfish to presume/ the long-ruling clan would not murder/ so many women and journalists./ when they stopped your convoy, Genalyn,/ did you know what was to come?”
But this, too, is rage.)

---oOo---

Filipinos have short memories, or Filipinos have huge forgiving hearts. Or it could have been an inspired attempt of Mr. Salud to respond to the earliest protest poem denouncing the Maguindanao slayings: Mila D. Aguilar’s “Answering Denise Levertov” (November 24, 2009).

“We are the walking dead/ Straddling the centuries/ Without remorse/ Shouting ourselves hoarse: Producing nothing.” Aguilar describes the massacre with pained resignation that nothing will finally come out of condemning the disembowelling of 57 citizens (including some 31 local media people).

Salud, through his Facebook plea, got over a 100 contributors to his Rage project in a month’s time. More sound and fury?

I responded with a poem spelling out a “silent scream”; I considered Salud’s effort a valiant recapturing of the function of poetry in galvanizing the emotions of revolutions.

Are rage (angry) poems effective equipment for expressing what would otherwise be a call to arms or street combats?

“Makibaka, huwag matakot!” (Fight! Struggle! Do not be daunted nor cowed! Do not be afraid!) became the battlecry of the Filipinos decrying the imposition of Martial Law in the 70s. They waded through street battles; the urgent rhythm of the mantra in their bellies.

Remember the alliteration behind Egalite! Liberte! Fraternite! while the storming of the Bastille rocked French society? Victor Hugo’s depiction of the French Revolution came to us in contemporary times as some of the most incendiary lyrics that served to forge bonds among the peasants and the agents provocateurs.

The Philippine Revolutions against the Spanish, American, and Japanese colonizers caught the smouldering fervour of the Filipino’s war of independence in the lyrics of that now immortal anthem Ang Bayan Ko. The same battlecry rallied Filipinos behind the People’s Power march to topple the martial law government in the 80s. People sing it in every protest gathering against all and sundry.

Ibon’g mang may layang lumipad,/ Kulung mo ay umiiyak!/ Bayan pa kayang sakdal dilag/ Ang di magnasang makaalpas?
(Translation: Even a bird that flies free,/ Would fly its captive coup!/ Would not a truly beautiful country/ Not dream and hanker to be free!)

Poetry and poetic cadence have always been handmaidens of protest movements.

However, they could only go so far. It is the residual effect of emotions stirred by these poems that linger, and they become the underpinning of sustained battlecries, the wellsprings of revolutionary thought.

While not all of those protest poets perished in the frenzy of combat, we remember them: People’s Republic of China sprung out of Mao Tse Tung’s Long March, and the poems of his Red Book; Jose Maria Sison, a Filipino poet and revolutionary, lives in exile unbound and unbent in the Netherlands; Epifanio San Juan still throws poetic brickbats against the Establishment for the peasants even in his exile in the bountiful United States, having suffered academic alienation from his country and colleagues; Jason Montana was up the in hills during the battles against the minions of corruption and martial law; Mila D. Aguilar endured incarceration only to find her continuing the fight today in the Philippine’s premier academic grove, the University of the Philippines.

Filipino poet par excellence Emmanuel Lacaba is still a desaparecido (or may have died in combat as this writer and certainly all his proud and grieving friends celebrated his demise in the mountain fastness of Mounts Arayat, Bukidnon, Mayon or Makiling --- romance-laden bastions of the myriad revolutions that have fragmented the Philippines even beyond its 7100 islands.
Some poets in Mr. Salud’s aborning anthology advocate the segueing of the guerrilla warfare sustained still onto its death throes by the outlawed National People’s Army.

Those poems that will certainly remain with men and women who will stand by human dignity and unfettered freedom will breed the Maos, Sisons, San Juans, Lacabas, Montanas and Aguilars in struggles yet to come.

I chose some of them here, and mark my words.

MILA D. AGUILAR
Before the rage poems started pouring in, Mila D. Aguilar wrote the fist “soundless scream” bemoaning the Maguindanao Massacre.

It is this soundless scream of rage which remains in the mind’s tympanum. It is this rage --- full of pain, and towering unsatiated anger, seen somewhat in Greek Tragedy and contemporary films like On the Waterfront, or actor Al Pacino, as the Godfather, performing a “soundless scream” over the murder of his daughter on the steps of the Scala. How dare anyone kill the patron’s progeny?

The silent scream is still the best and most graphic expression of rage. It is that which almost always remains with the most telling effect long after the flash of anger or miracle of forgiveness.

ANSWERING DENISE LEVERTOV
by Mila D. Aguilar

Here, Denise, they don't
Chop off heads by the day
They just waylay you
On some lonely byway
Or highway
As the case may be
Whether you're alone
Or with
A convoy of journalists
Meant to protect your
Filing of candidacy.
One, two, fifty killed
Numbers don't matter
It's the principle that counts:
The principle of power
Over people
Of family
Over fold.
We know
No other life
We are the walking dead
Straddling the centuries
Without remorse
Shouting ourselves hoarse:
Producing nothing.

(From studentsofenglish Blog - November 24, 2009 )
(Part 2, SOME POEMS FROM THE ANTHOLOGY OF RAGE)