I Teach My Child
Gemino H. Abad
I.
I teach my child
To survive.
I begin with our words,
           The simple words first
And last.
They are hardest to learn.
          Words like home,
Or friend, or to forgive.
These words are relations.
They are difficult to bear;
Their fruits are unseen.
          Or words that promise
Or dream.
Words like honor, or certainty,
Or cheer.
Rarest of sound,
Their roots run deep;
These are words that aspire,
They cast no shade.
          These are not words
To speak.
These are the words
Of which we consist,
Indefinite,
Without other ground.
 
II.
         My child
Is without syllables
To utter him,
Captive yet to his origin
In silence.
          By every word
To rule his space,
He is released;
He is shaped by his speech.
           Every act, too,
Is first without words.
There's no rehearsal
To adjust your deed
From direction of its words.
           The words are given,
 
But there's no script.
Their play is hidden,
We are their stage.
           These are the words
That offer to our care
Both sky and earth,
           These same words
That may elude our acts.
If we speak them
But cannot meet their sound,
They strand us still
In our void,
Blank like the child
With the uphill silence
Of his words' climb.
           And so,
I teach my child
To survive.
I begin with our words,
           The simple words first
And last.
The Secret Language
Maria Luisa B. Aguilar-Carino
I have learned your speech,
Fair stranger; for you
I have oiled my hair
And coiled it tight
Into a braid as thick
And beautiful as the serpent
In your story of Eden.
For you, I have covered
My breasts and hidden,
Among the folds of my surrendered
Inheritance, the beads
I have worn since girlhood.
It is fifty years now
Since the day my father
Took me to the school in Bua,
A headman's terrified
Peace-gift.  In the doorway,
The teacher stood, her hair
The bleached color of corn,
Watching with bird-eyes.
Now, I am Christina.
I am told I can make lace
Fine enough to lay upon the altar
Of a cathedral in Europe.
But this is a place
That I will never see.
 
I cook for tourists at an inn;
They praise my lemon pie
And my English, which they say
Is faultless.  I smile
And look past the window,
Imagining father's and grandfather's cattle
Grazing by the smoke trees.
But it is evening, and these
Are ghosts.
 
In the night,
When I am alone at last,
I lie uncorseted
Upon the iron bed,
Composing my lost beads
Over my chest, dreaming back
Each flecked and opalescent
Color, crooning the names,
Along with mine:
Binaay, Binaay.
Gabu
Carlos A. Angeles
The battering restlessness of the sea
Insists a tidal fury upon the beach
At Gabu, and its pure consistency
Havocs the wasteland hard within its reach.
Brutal the daylong bashing of its heart
Against the seascape where, for miles around,
Farther than sight itself, the rock-stones part
And drop into the elemental wound.
The waste of centuries is grey and dead
And neutral where the sea has beached its brine,
Where the split salt of its heart lies spread
Among the dark habiliments of Time.
The vital splendor misses.  For here, here
At Gabu where the ageless tide recurs
All things forfeited are most loved and dear.
It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.
Landscape with Figures
Carlos Bulosan
Homeward again under foreign stars,
history was a strange gush of wind from memory
that came to echo waterfalls of those years:
home to find the place lost among
galaxies of signs.  The hills were gone.  The river
trail was forgotten. . . Trying to remember meadowlark
and those who perished in the vanishing land
(bones in the earth where our parents died poor),
the journey fell into heavy tides of flowing
scorn that echoed and reechoed time there.
The sun was most unkind to the place:
history: names of men: patterns of life:
all that distant floodtide heaved and moved,
breaking familiar names that immortal tongues
clipped for the heart to cry, "Home is a foreign address,
every step toward it is a step toward three hundred years
of exile from the truth. . ."
        It was not homeward
to the first known land, nor escape
to white sea sprays blossoming on inland shore,
nor love leaping the boundaries naked in the soul,
but a vast heritage of war and destruction breaking
too soon for the living and willing to die.
 
Life is a foreign language.  Every man mispronounced it . . .
(1942)
An Introduction to Dinesen
Ma. Fatima V. Lim
First of all, this is not a book.
There are no words nor numbered pages.
A woman is speaking in low tones from another room,
In another house, a distant country
Her whisper close as mother's
Or lover's song warming the ear.
 
Snow is falling.  Lightning flashes in a desert.
Waves lap up and down an endless beach.
When planets collide, they do not crumble.
At the end of this world is another.
 
In large halls, strangers dance
Waltzing with wings and heavy hearts.
You call each day by a secret name.
On porcelain jars, under the intertwining trees,
Painted lovers touch tentatively, painted lips.
They do not part even as you watch them.
 
When she leaves you,
Her receding figure growing large in your eyes,
You will not call after her.
Wise as a child weighed down by discoveries,
You can bear anything.  From now on,
All simple lives are legendary.
You keep her fairy tales like sweets
Or stolen stones under your tongue.
Soledad
Angela C. Manalang-Gloria
It was a sacrilege, the neighbors cried,
The way she shattered every mullioned pane
To let a firebrand in.  They tried in vain
To understand how one so carved from pride
And glassed in dream could have so flung aside
Her graven days, or why she dared profane
The bread and wine of life for one insane
Moment with him.  The scandal never died.
But no one guessed that loveliness would claim
Her soul's cathedral burned by his desires,
Or that he left her aureoled in flame. . .
And seeing nothing but her blackened spires,
The town condemned this girl who loved too well
And found her heaven in the depths of hell.
(1935)
Untitled
Jose Garcia Villa
God said, "I made a man
Out of clay-
   But so bright he, he spun
Himself to brightest Day
Till he was all shining gold
And oh,
   He was handsome to behold!
But in his hands held he a bow
Aimed at me who created
Him.  And I said,
   'Wouldst murder me
Who am thy Fountainhead!'
Then spoke he the man of gold:
'I will not
   Murder thee!  I do but
Measure thee.  Hold
Thy peace.'  And this I did.
But I was curious
   Of this so regal head.
'Give thy name!'- 'Sir! Genius.'"
To a Friend Off to One of the Many Writing
Workshops in the States
R.C. Sunico
You will need no pens to bring,
no foolscap.  Lexicons and thesauruses
ripen on shelves there, more often
than wheat on their fields.
 
Bring only your lust and irony,
a well-fitting rubber and
prepare in your memory
 
Flasks with which to capture
the first snow on the timberline,
the attar of magnolias
and the unerring V of the first ducks
arrowing towards a warmer dawn.
 
Eye classrooms with suspicion.
Eschew seminars and calling cards,
pre-meditated allusions to writers
you have never read, now suddenly
in academic vogue.
Avoid weak beer and the dead among them
who compete over the obscurities of rhyme.
Be poet and sing.  Endow them
with the phosphorescences of our clime.

Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipina Maids
Alfred A. Yuson
Art, my dears, is not cleaning up
after the act.  Neither is it washing off
grime with the soap of tact.  In fact
and in truth, my dears, art is dead
 
center, between meals, amid spices
and spoilage.  Fills up the whitebread
sweep of life's obedient slices.
 
Art is the letters you send home
about the man you serve.  Or the salad
you bring in to my parlor of elites.
While Manhattan stares down at the soup
of our affinities.  And we hear talk of coup
in your islands.  There they copy love
the way I do, as how I arrive over and over
again at art.  Perhaps too it is the time
marked by the sand in your shoes, spilling
softly like rumor.  After your hearts I lust.
In our God you trust.  And it's your day off.
The Three Temptations
E. San Juan, Jr.
"What death would you desire?"
She says: "A bronze death that yields
a cloister for the heart; or that
which is charter for a giant, a silver death;
or that for which one must labor:
one's sacrament, that's a death of gold?"
 
Alas, how can your pilgrim choose?
Always there's the hissing of fire--
On my neck creeps the salamander!
 
But here on this steadfast ground
earth whereon the mighty have fallen,
gnomes choir a bronze hymn to you
 
and yet could I but rear for myself--
a giant's head far from all solitude--
O how the undine's luster shall flood
into my silver sepulcher!  For it is fate
out of gorges between sheer cliffs
that gives us wings for pilgrimage
and you who dance like a scented sylph
on the winds have not, have not
the golden character of grace
 
and should you but pray for me
'a fine and private place' plucked up
for this death, my death, that's golden
to you alone I give my only name--
"Oh, now, what death would you desire?"
She says: "There is only my embrace."