May is Republika ng Pilipinas PH Heritage Month
In honor of and with respect for Philippine Heritage Month in May I’d like to share some Philippine poets with readers this week.
WHAT POETRY DOES NOT SAY
By Ophelia Alcantara Dimalanta (musician and poet, 1932-2010)
All shades of what is held Most dear most guarded
are frailest, easily violated, and therefore most readily
escape poetry’s constraining Ministries: singular touch,
a hurried whisper audible only to the mind’s ear,
a tune, a place, a fitful memory.
For poetry never says; It unsays. To say is to confine, contain.
To unsay is to explore the vaguely all-hovering presence
of the unseen, deliberately left-out.
BRINGING the DOLLS for ANYA
By Merlie Alunan (b.1943)
Two dolls in rags and tatters, one missing an arm and a leg,
the other blind in one eye – I grabbed them from her arms,
“No,” I said, “they cannot come,” Each tight baggage I had
packed only for the barest need: no room for sentiment or
memory to clutter with loose ends my stern resolve, I reasoned,
even a child must learn she cannot take what must be left behind.
And so the boat turned seaward, a smart wind blowing dry the
stealthy tears I could not wipe. Then I saw—rags, tatters and all—
There among the neat trim packs, the dolls I ruled to leave behind.
Her silence should have warned me she knew her burdens as I
knew mine: her clean white years unlived—and paid my price.
She battened on a truth she knew I must own: when what’s at
stake is loyalty or love, hers are the true rights. Her own faiths
she must keep, not I.
NAGING BATO
Poem by Ivy Alvarez.
(Naging bato is a Filipino idiom meaning became valueless, lost,
Frozen… literally turned into stone).
If Medusa were Filipina, I would want her power. Many’s the time
when one of us is gazed upon without consequence, when one is
apprised, judged, appraised, for sale and consumption. This will be
an end to it. Imagine people scurrying and scrambling, abandoning
their tilapias, their bagoóng, and tribal tattoos, their instances of
condescension falling, like crumbs to the floor in their bid to avoid
my gaze, and turn all their ideas of escapes as mere grooves and
chipped messages in sandstone, small grass tongues tangle in my
eyes, graze my ears with gentle portent, the wet hand on each fang
a dew on my skin, aspirating blessings and curses in equal measure,
which I save for later. The brine of my foremothers’ sweat calls to
me, their thirst ever—and all—encompassing.
(Ivy Alvarez was born in the Philippines and raised in Australia, she lived in Scotland, Ireland and Wales before moving to Auckland, NZ in 2014)
Joey aka “Pepe Batbon” Connolly is a retired educator who taught in the CNMI, NOLA, and LVNV. He is the Poet Laureate of Tinian and enjoys stargazing.
