Poetry-Int.-and-Story-Telling

West Visayas State University
(Formerly Iloilo Normal School)

CALINOG CAMPUS
Office of the Cultural Affairs
2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

“WVSU-CC: Pushing the Boundaries of Excellence via Culture and Arts.”
November 28-30
POETRY INTERPRETATION
Still I Rise
BY MAY A AN GELOU
You may write me down in history You may shoot me with your words,
With your bitter, twisted lies, You may cut me with your eyes,
You may trod me in the very dirt You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like dust, I'll rise. But still, like air, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you? Does my sexiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom? Does it come as a surprise
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells That I dance like I've got diamonds
Pumping in my living room. At the meeting of my thighs?
Just like moons and like suns, Out of the huts of history's shame
With the certainty of tides, I rise
Just like hopes springing high, Up from a past that's rooted in pain
Still I'll rise. I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Did you want to see me broken? Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Bowed head and lowered eyes? Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
Shoulders falling down like teardrops. I rise
Weakened by my soulful cries. Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Does my haughtiness offend you? Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
Don't you take it awful hard I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines I rise
Diggin' in my own back yard. I rise
I rise.
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STORYTELLING
MORELLA
by Edgar Allan Poe
WITH a feeling of deep yet most singular affection I regarded my friend Morella.
Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul from our first meeting,
burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros, and bitter
and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define
their unusual meaning or regulate their vague intensity. Yet we met; and fate bound us
together at the altar, and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love. She, however,
shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a
happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream.
Morella's erudition was profound. As I hope to live, her talents were of no

common order—her powers of mind were gigantic. I felt this, and, in many matters,
became her pupil. I soon, however, found that, perhaps on account of her Presburg
education, she placed before me a number of those mystical writings which are usually
considered the mere dross of the early German literature. These, for what reason I could
not imagine, were her favourite and constant study—and that in process of time they
became my own, should be attributed to the simple but effectual influence of habit
and example.
In all this, if I err not, my reason had little to do. My convictions, or I forget myself,
were in no manner acted upon by the ideal, nor was any tincture of the mysticism
which I read to be discovered, unless I am greatly mistaken, either in my deeds or in my
thoughts. Persuaded of this, I abandoned myself implicitly to the guidance of my wife,
and entered with an unflinching heart into the intricacies of her studies. And then—
then, when poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling within me—
would Morella place her cold hand upon my own, and rake up from the ashes of a
dead philosophy some low, singular words, whose strange meaning burned themselves
in upon my memory. And then, hour after hour, would I linger by her side, and dwell
upon the music of her voice, until at length its melody was tainted with terror, and there
fell a shadow upon my soul, and I grew pale, and shuddered inwardly at those too
unearthly tones. And thus, joy suddenly faded into horror, and the most beautiful
became the most hideous, as Hinnon became Ge-Henna.
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It is unnecessary to state the exact character of those disquisitions which,

growing out of the volumes I have mentioned, formed, for so long a time, almost the
sole conversation of Morella and myself. By the learned in what might be termed
theological morality they will be readily conceived, and by the unlearned they would,
at all events, be little understood. The wild Pantheism of Fichte; the modified
Paliggenedia of the Pythagoreans; and, above all, the doctrines of Identity as urged by
Schelling, were generally the points of discussion presenting the most of beauty to the
imaginative Morella. That identity which is termed personal, Mr. Locke, I think, truly
defines to consist in the saneness of rational being. And since by person we understand
an intelligent essence having reason, and since there is a consciousness which always
accompanies thinking, it is this which makes us all to be that which we call ourselves,
thereby distinguishing us from other beings that think, and giving us our personal
identity. But the principium indivduationis, the notion of that identity which at death is or
is not lost for ever, was to me, at all times, a consideration of intense interest; not more
from the perplexing and exciting nature of its consequences, than from the marked
and agitated manner in which Morella mentioned them.
But, indeed, the time had now arrived when the mystery of my wife's manner
oppressed me as a spell. I could no longer bear the touch of her wan fingers, nor the
low tone of her musical language, nor the lustre of her melancholy eyes. And she knew
all this, but did not upbraid; she seemed conscious of my weakness or my folly, and,
smiling, called it fate. She seemed also conscious of a cause, to me unknown, for the
gradual alienation of my regard; but she gave me no hint or token of its nature. Yet was
she woman, and pined away daily. In time the crimson spot settled steadily upon the
cheek, and the blue veins upon the pale forehead became prominent; and one instant
my nature melted into pity, but in, next I met the glance of her meaning eyes, and then
my soul sickened and became giddy with the giddiness of one who gazes downward
into some dreary and unfathomable abyss.
Shall I then say that I longed with an earnest and consuming desire for the
moment of Morella's decease? I did; but the fragile spirit clung to its tenement of clay
for many days, for many weeks and irksome months, until my tortured nerves obtained
the mastery over my mind, and I grew furious through delay, and, with the heart of a
fiend, cursed the days and the hours and the bitter moments, which seemed to
lengthen and lengthen as her gentle life declined, like shadows in the dying of the day.
But one autumnal evening, when the winds lay still in heaven, Morella called me
to her bedside. There was a dim mist over all the earth, and a warm glow upon the
waters, and amid the rich October leaves of the forest, a rainbow from the firmament
had surely fallen.
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"It is a day of days," she said, as I approached; "a day of all days either to live or
die. It is a fair day for the sons of earth and life—ah, more fair for the daughters of
heaven and death!"
I kissed her forehead, and she continued:
"I am dying, yet shall I live."
"Morella!"
"The days have never been when thou couldst love me—but her whom in life
thou didst abhor, in death thou shalt adore."
"Morella!"
"I repeat I am dying. But within me is a pledge of that affection—ah, how little!—
which thou didst feel for me, Morella. And when my spirit departs shall the child live—
thy child and mine, Morella's. But thy days shall be days of sorrow—that sorrow which is
the most lasting of impressions, as the cypress is the most enduring of trees. For the hours
of thy happiness are over and joy is not gathered twice in a life, as the roses of Paestum
twice in a year. Thou shalt no longer, then, play the Teian with time, but, being ignorant
of the myrtle and the vine, thou shalt bear about with thee thy shroud on the earth, as
do the Moslemin at Mecca."
"Morella!" I cried, "Morella! how knowest thou this?" but she turned away her face
upon the pillow and a slight tremor coming over her limbs, she thus died, and I heard
her voice no more.
Yet, as she had foretold, her child, to which in dying she had given birth, which
breathed not until the mother breathed no more, her child, a daughter, lived. And she
grew strangely in stature and intellect, and was the perfect resemblance of her who
had departed, and I loved her with a love more fervent than I had believed it possible
to feel for any denizen of earth.
But, ere long the heaven of this pure affection became darkened, and gloom,
and horror, and grief swept over it in clouds. I said the child grew strangely in stature
and intelligence. Strange, indeed, was her rapid increase in bodily size, but terrible, oh!
terrible were the tumultuous thoughts which crowded upon me while watching the
development of her mental being. Could it be otherwise, when I daily discovered in the
conceptions of the child the adult powers and faculties of the woman? when the
lessons of experience fell from the lips of infancy? and when the wisdom or the passions
of maturity I found hourly gleaming from its full and speculative eye? When, I say, all this
became evident to my appalled senses, when I could no longer hide it from my soul,
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nor throw it off from those perceptions which trembled to receive it, is it to be wondered
at that suspicions, of a nature fearful and exciting, crept in upon my spirit, or that my
thoughts fell back aghast upon the wild tales and thrilling theories of the entombed
Morella? I snatched from the scrutiny of the world a being whom destiny compelled me
to adore, and in the rigorous seclusion of my home, watched with an agonizing anxiety
over all which concerned the beloved.
And as years rolled away, and I gazed day after day upon her holy, and mild,
and eloquent face, and poured over her maturing form, day after day did I discover
new points of resemblance in the child to her mother, the melancholy and the dead.
And hourly grew darker these shadows of similitude, and more full, and more definite,
and more perplexing, and more hideously terrible in their aspect. For that her smile was
like her mother's I could bear; but then I shuddered at its too perfect identity, that her
eyes were like Morella's I could endure; but then they, too, often looked down into the
depths of my soul with Morella's own intense and bewildering meaning. And in the
contour of the high forehead, and in the ringlets of the silken hair, and in the wan
fingers which buried themselves therein, and in the sad musical tones of her speech,
and above all—oh, above all, in the phrases and expressions of the dead on the lips of
the loved and the living, I found food for consuming thought and horror, for a worm
that would not die.
Thus passed away two lustra of her life, and as yet my daughter remained
nameless upon the earth. "My child," and "my love," were the designations usually
prompted by a father's affection, and the rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other
intercourse. Morella's name died with her at her death. Of the mother I had never
spoken to the daughter, it was impossible to speak. Indeed, during the brief period of
her existence, the latter had received no impressions from the outward world, save such
as might have been afforded by the narrow limits of her privacy. But at length the
ceremony of baptism presented to my mind, in its unnerved and agitated condition, a
present deliverance from the terrors of my destiny. And at the baptismal font I hesitated
for a name. And many titles of the wise and beautiful, of old and modern times, of my
own and foreign lands, came thronging to my lips, with many, many fair titles of the
gentle, and the happy, and the good. What prompted me then to disturb the memory
of the buried dead? What demon urged me to breathe that sound, which in its very
recollection was wont to make ebb the purple blood in torrents from the temples to the
heart? What fiend spoke from the recesses of my soul, when amid those dim aisles, and
in the silence of the night, I whispered within the ears of the holy man the syllables—
Morella? What more than fiend convulsed the features of my child, and overspread
them with hues of death, as starting at that scarcely audible sound, she turned her
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glassy eyes from the earth to heaven, and falling prostrate on the black slabs of our
ancestral vault, responded—"I am here!"
Distinct, coldly, calmly distinct, fell those few simple sounds within my ear, and
thence like molten lead rolled hissingly into my brain. Years—years may pass away, but
the memory of that epoch never. Nor was I indeed ignorant of the flowers and the
vine—but the hemlock and the cypress overshadowed me night and day. And I kept
no reckoning of time or place, and the stars of my fate faded from heaven, and
therefore the earth grew dark, and its figures passed by me like flitting shadows, and
among them all I beheld only—Morella. The winds of the firmament breathed but one
sound within my ears, and the ripples upon the sea murmured evermore—Morella. But
she died; and with my own hands I bore her to the tomb; and I laughed with a long
and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first in the channel where I laid the second.
—Morella.
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November 28-30
Why Don’t You Dance?

by Raymond Carver
In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his
front yard. The mattress was stripped, and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two
pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the
bedroom—nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading
lamp on her side.
His side, her side.
He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.
The chiffonier stood a few feet from the foot of the bed. He had emptied the
drawers into cartons that morning, and the cartons were in the living room. A portable
heater was next to the chiffonier. A rattan chair with a decorator pillow stood at the
foot of the bed. The buffed aluminum kitchen set took up a part of the driveway. A
yellow muslin cloth, much too large, a gift, covered the table and hung down over the
sides. A potted fern was on the table, and a few feet away from this stood a sofa and
chair and a floor lamp. The desk was pushed against the garage door. A few utensils
were on the desk, along with a wall clock and two framed prints. There was also in the
driveway a carton with cups, glasses, and plates, each object wrapped in newspaper.
That morning he had cleared out the closets, and except for the three cartons in the
living room, all the stuff was out of the home. He had run an extension cord on out there
and everything was connected. Things worked, no different from how it was when they
were inside.
Now and then a car slowed, and people stared. But no one stopped. It occurred
to him that he wouldn't, either.
"It must be a yard sale," the girl said to the boy.
This girl and this boy were furnishing a little apartment.
"Let's see what they want for the bed," the girl said.
"And for the TV," the boy said.
The boy pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the kitchen table.
They got out of the car and began to examine things, the girl touching the
muslin cloth, the boy plugging in the blender and turning the dial to MINCE, the girl
picking up a chafing dish, the boy turning on the television set and making little
adjustments.
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He sat down on the sofa to watch. He lit a cigarette, looked around, flipped the
match into the grass.
The girl sat on the bed. She pushed off her shoes and lay back. She thought she
could see a star.
"Come here, Jack. Try this bed. Bring one of those pillows," she said.
"How is it?" he said.
"Try it," she said.
He looked around. The house was dark.
"I feel funny," he said. "Better see if anybody's home."
She bounced on the bed.
"Try it first," she said.
He lay down on the bed and put the pillow under his head.
"How does it feel?" she said.
"It feels firm," he said.
She turned on her side and put her hand to his face.
"Kiss me," she said.
"Let's get up," he said.
"Kiss me," she said.
She closed her eyes. She held him.
He said, "I'll see if anybody's home."
But he just sat up and stayed where he was, making believe he was watching
the television.
Lights came on in the houses up and down the street.
"Wouldn't it be funny if," the girl said and grinned and didn't finish.
The boy laughed, but for no good reason. For no good reason, he switched the
reading lamp on.

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The girl brushed away a mosquito, whereupon the boy stood up and tucked in
his shirt.
"I'll see if anybody's home," he said. "I don't think anybody's home. But if anybody
is, I'll see what things are going for."
"Whatever they ask, offer ten dollars less. It's always a good idea," she said. "And,
besides, they must be desperate or something."
"It's a pretty good TV," the boy said.
"Ask them how much," the girl said.
The man came down the sidewalk with a sack from the market. He had
sandwiches, beer, whiskey. He saw the car in the driveway and the girl on the bed. He
saw the television set going and the boy on the porch.
"Hello," the man said to the girl. "You found the bed. That's good."
"Hello," the girl said, and got up. "I was just trying it out." She patted the bed.
"It's a pretty good bed."
"It's a good bed," the man said, and put down the sack and took out the beer
and the whiskey.
"We thought nobody was here," the boy said. "We're interested in the bed and
maybe in the TV. Also, maybe the desk. How much do you want for the bed?"
"I was thinking fifty dollars for the bed," the man said.
"Would you take forty?" the girl asked.
"I'll take forty," the man said.
He took a glass out of the carton. He took the newspaper off the glass. He broke
the seal on the whiskey.
"How about the TV?" the boy said.
"Twenty-five."
"Would you take fifteen?" the girl said.
"Fifteen's okay. I could take fifteen," the man said.

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The girl looked at the boy.
"You kids, you'll want a drink," the man said. "Glasses in that box. I'm going to
sit down. I'm going to sit down on the sofa."
The man sat on the sofa, leaned back, and stared at the boy and the girl.
The boy found two glasses and poured whiskey.
"That's enough," the girl said. "I think I want water in mine."
She pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.
"There's water in that spigot over there," the man said. "Turn on that spigot."
The boy came back with the watered whiskey. He cleared his throat and sat
down at the kitchen table. He grinned. But he didn't drink anything from his glass.
The man gazed at the television. He finished his drink and started another. He
reached to turn on the floor lamp. It was then that his cigarette dropped from his fingers
and fell between the cushions.
The girl got up to help him find it.
"So what do you want?" the boy said to the girl.
The boy took out the checkbook and held it to his lips as if thinking.
"I want the desk," the girl said. "How much money is the desk?"
The man waved his hand at this preposterous question.
"Name a figure," he said.
He looked at them as they sat at the table. In the lamplight, there was something
about their faces. It was nice or it was nasty. There was no telling.
"I'm going to turn off this TV and put on a record," the man said. "This record
player is going, too. Cheap. Make me an offer."
He poured more whiskey and opened a beer.
"Everything goes," said the man.

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The girl held out her glass and the man poured.
"Thank you," she said. "You're very nice," she said.
"It goes to your head," the boy said. "I'm getting it in the head." He held up his
glass and jiggled it.
The man finished his drink and poured another, and then he found the box with
the records.
"Pick something," the man said to the girl, and he held the records out to her.
The boy was writing the check.
"Here," the girl said, picking something, picking anything, for she did not know the
names on these labels. She got up from the table and sat down again. She did not
want to sit still.
"I'm making it out to cash," the boy said.
"Sure," the man said.
They drank. They listened to the record. And then the man put on another.
Why don't you kids dance? he decided to say, and then he said it. "Why don't
you dance?"
"I don't think so," the boy said.
"Go ahead," the man said. "It's my yard. You can dance if you want to."
Arms about each other, their bodies pressed together, the boy and the girl
moved up and down the driveway. They were dancing. And when the record was
over, they did it again, and when that one ended, the boy said. "I'm drunk."
The girl said, "You're not drunk."
"Well, I'm drunk," the boy said.
The man turned the record over and the boy said, "I am."
"Dance with me," the girl said to the boy and then to the man, and when the
man stood up, she came to him with her arms wide open.
"Those people over there, they're watching," she said.
"It's okay," the man said. "It's my place," he said.

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"Let them watch," the girl said.
"That's right," the man said. "They thought they'd seen everything over here. But
they haven't seen this, have they?"
He felt her breath on his neck.
"I hope you like your bed," he said.
The girl closed and then opened her eyes. She pushed her face into the man's
shoulder. She pulled the man closer.
"You must be desperate or something," she said.
Weeks later, she said: "The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there
in his yard. No lie. We got real angry and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don't
laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy give it to us.
and all these cheap records. Will you look at this?"
She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to
get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.
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DEAD STARS
by Paz Marquez Benitez
(Excerpt of Part 1 and 2 and full Part 3)
THROUGH the open window the air-steeped outdoors passed into his room,
quietly enveloping him, stealing into his very thought. Esperanza, Julia, the sorry mess he
had made of life, the years to come even now beginning to weigh down, to crush--
they lost concreteness, diffused into formless melancholy. The tranquil murmur of
conversation issued from the brick tiled azotea where Don Julian and Carmen were
busy puttering away among the rose pots.
Alfredo remembered he gripped the soft hand so near his own. At his touch, the
girl turned her face away, but he heard her voice say very low, "Good-bye." He
remembered how his slow blood began to beat violently, irregularly. A girl was coming
down the line—Julia Salas, a girl that was striking, and vividly alive, the woman that
could cause violent commotion in his heart, yet had no place in the completed
ordering of his life.
AS Alfredo Salazar leaned against the boat rail to watch the evening settling
over the lake, he wondered if Esperanza would attribute any significance to this trip of
his. He was supposed to be inSta. Cruz whither the case of the People of the Philippine
Islands vs. Belina et al had kept him, and there he would have been if Brigida Samuy
had not been so important to the defense. He had to find that elusive old woman. That
the search was leading him to that particular lake town which was Julia Salas' home
should not disturb him unduly Yet he was disturbed to a degree utterly out of proportion
to the prosaicness of his errand. That inner tumult was no surprise to him; in the last eight
years he had become used to such occasional storms. He had long realized that he
could not forget Julia Salas. Still, he had tried to be content and not to remember too
much. The climber of mountains who has known the back-break, the lonesomeness,
and the chill, finds a certain restfulness in level paths made easy to his feet. He looks up
sometimes from the valley where settles the dusk of evening, but he knows he must not
heed the radiant beckoning. Maybe, in time, he would cease even to look up.
He was not unhappy in his marriage. He felt no rebellion: only the calm of
capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstance and of
character. His life had simply ordered itself; no more struggles, no more stirring up of
emotions that got a man nowhere. From his capacity of complete detachment he
derived a strange solace. The essential himself, the himself that had its being in the core
of his thought, would, he reflected, always be free and alone. When claims
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encroached too insistently, as sometimes they did, he retreated into the inner fastness,
and from that vantage he saw things and people around him as remote and alien, as
incidents that did not matter. At such times did Esperanza feel baffled and helpless; he
was gentle, even tender, but immeasurably far away, beyond her reach.
Lights were springing into life on the shore. That was the town, a little up-tilted
town nestling in the dark greenness of the groves. A snubcrested belfry stood beside the
ancient church. On the outskirts the evening smudges glowed red through the sinuous
mists of smoke that rose and lost themselves in thepurple shadows of the hills. There was
a young moonwhich grew slowly luminous as the coral tints in the sky yielded to the
darker blues of evening.
The vessel approached the landing quietly, trailing awake of long golden ripples
on the dark water.
Peculiar hill inflections came to his ears from the crowd assembled to meet the
boat--slow, singing cadences, characteristic of the Laguna lake-shore speech. From
where he stood he could not distinguish faces, so he had no way of knowing whether
the presidente was there to meet him or not. Just then a voice shouted.
"Is the abogado there? Abogado!"
"What abogado?" someone irately asked.
That must be the presidente, he thought, and went down to the landing.
It was a policeman, a tall pock-marked individual. The presidente had left with
Brigida Samuy—Tandang "Binday"--that noon for Santa Cruz. Señor Salazar's second
letter had arrived late, but the wife had read it and said, "Go and meet the abogado
and invite him to our house."
Alfredo Salazar courteously declined the invitation. He would sleep on board

since the boat would leave at four the next morning anyway. So the presidente had
received his first letter? Alfredo did not know because that official had not sent an
answer. "Yes," the policeman replied, "but he could not write because we heard that
Tandang Binday was in San Antonio so we went there to find her."
San Antonio was up in the hills! Good man, the presidente! He, Alfredo, must do
something for him. It was not every day that one met with such willingness to help.
Eight o'clock, lugubriously tolled from the bell tower, found the boat settled into
a somnolent quiet. A cot had been brought out and spread for him, but it was too bare
to be inviting at that hour. It was too early to sleep: he would walk around the town. His
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heart beat faster as he picked his way to shore over the rafts made fast to sundry piles
driven into the water.
How peaceful the town was! Here and there a little tienda was still open, its dim
light issuing forlornly through the single window which served as counter.
An occasional couple sauntered by, the women's chinelas making scraping

sounds. From a distance came the shrill voices of children playing games on the street--
tubigan perhaps, or "hawk-and-chicken."
The thought of Julia Salas in that quiet place filled him with a pitying sadness.
How would life seem now if he had married Julia Salas? Had he meant anything
to her? That unforgettable red-and-gold afternoon in early April haunted him with a
sense of incompleteness as restless as other unlaid ghosts. She had not married--why?
Faithfulness, he reflected, was not a conscious effort at regretful memory. It was

something unvolitional, maybe a recurrent awareness of irreplaceability.
Irrelevant trifles--a cool wind on his forehead, far-away sounds as of voices in a

dream--at times moved him to an oddly irresistible impulse to listen as to an insistent,
unfinished prayer.
A few inquiries led him to a certain little tree-ceilinged street where the young
moon wove indistinct filigrees of fight and shadow. In the gardens the cotton tree threw
its angular shadow athwart the low stone wall; and in the cool, stilly midnight the cock's
first call rose in tall, soaring jets of sound. Calle Luz.
Somehow or other, he had known that he would find her house because she
would surely be sitting at the window. Where else, before bedtime on a moonlit night?
The house was low and the light in the sala behind her threw her head into
unmistakable relief. He sensed rather than saw her start of vivid surprise.
"Good evening," he said, raising his hat.
"Good evening. Oh! Are you in town?"
"On some little business," he answered with a feeling of painful constraint.
"Won't you come up?"
He considered. His vague plans had not included this.
But Julia Salas had left the window, calling to her mother as she did so. After a
while, someone came downstairs with a lighted candle to open the door. At last--he
was shaking her hand.
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She had not changed much--a little less slender, not so eagerly alive, yet
something had gone. He missed it, sitting opposite her, looking thoughtfully into her fine
dark eyes. She asked him about the hometown, about this and that, in a sober,
somewhat meditative tone. He conversed with increasing ease, though with a growing
wonder that he should be there at all. He could not take his eyes from her face. What
had she lost? Or was the loss his? He felt an impersonal curiosity creeping into his gaze.
The girl must have noticed, for her cheek darkened in a blush.
Gently--was it experimentally?--he pressed her hand at parting; but his own felt
undisturbed and emotionless. Did she still care? The answer to the question hardly
interested him.
The young moon had set, and from the uninviting cot he could see one half of a
star-studded sky.
So that was all over.
Why had he obstinately clung to that dream? So all these years--since when?--
he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their
appointed places in the heavens. An immense sadness as of loss invaded his spirit, a
vast homesickness for some immutable refuge of the heart far away where faded
gardens bloom again, and where live on in unchanging freshness, the dear, dead loves
of vanished youth.
CALINOG CAMPUS

November 28-30
A Son is Born
(Part I, III-V)
Manuel E. Arguilla
1937
It was the year the locusts came and ate the young rice fields, leaving only raw stumps
that had to be plowed under again to make way for a second planting. Harvest time came late
that year and far into the month of November we cut the hay in the fields.
Those were long nights, cutting the hay in the fields under the cold white moon, in the
month of November. My father, as soon as the last head of grain was safely in the barn, left
every day for Santiago to build the house of Don Anchong, whose son Emilio was arriving from
America at Christmas time. His son had gone long years ago to America and there he made a
great fortune, married a woman beautiful beyond words, and now he was coming home.
My father said when he left in the early morning, before the sun came up over the
Katayaghan hills, “Today, you cut the hay in the south field.” He spoke to my mother who was
putting on the bamboo shelf the big wooden platter that held what was left of our breakfast of
rice fried in pig’s fat.
I was gulping down the last, sweet mouthful of ginger water Mother had boiled, and
Berting, my younger brother, held in his first half a cake of brown sugar.
“Give it back to me, Berting,” said my mother, extending a hand for the cake of sugar.
“Yes, take a bite. Take one now and give the rest to me,” said my mother, while my father went
down the ladder, his box of tools across his shoulder, the clink of the chisels and the files and the
plane blades and the hammer and nails inside coming up to our ears.
“Ana,” said my father from the ground below, “you heard what I said? Let the boys cut
the hay in the south field today. Tonight when I come home we will cut the hay in the long field
near Ca’ Istac’s in the west. Berting, do not forget to water your carabao in the Waig in the
afternoon. Let him stay in the water till nightfall and see that he does not fight with the big bull of
Lacay’ Inggo.”
The clink of chisels and plane blades and nails inside my father’s tool box became lost in
the distance. The hens under the kitchen clucked to the hungry chicks. In the yard under the
camachile tree the big red rooster chased the young pullets until, screaming and cackling and
scolding, with many a frenzied flapping of their strong young wings, they came up the ladder to
take shelter in the kitchen. Beneath the ladder the red rooster crowed proudly, three times.
With my father gone, Berting and I made a rush for the ladder, shooing away the
chickens in our way, scaring with our noise the red rooster under the stairs, much to his
annoyance.
CALINOG CAMPUS

November 28-30
Father went back to work on the house of Don Anchong in Santiago. He left us to tend
the growing tobacco plants. It was December now and the nights had become chilly. In the
dawn , Mother us up and, shivering in the cold breeze that blew down the misty tops of the
Katayaghan hills, we went to water the tobacco plants. It was very cold. The sharp-edged clods
hurt our benumbed feet. But the cart, sun-heated the day before, had warmed the water in the
well and it was pleasant washing our face and hands and feet, only the wind made us colder
than ever, afterward.
When we went back to the house for breakfast, Father had gone to Santiago. We
refused to finish watering the rest of the tobacco plants. We ran out of the house, deaf to the
calls of my mother.
“I’ll tell your father,” she threatened, but she never did.
We played all morning with Artemio and Peddong and Inzo by the railroad tracks. We
came home to eat hungrily at noon and Mother had finished watering the tobacco plants.
One morning Father hitched the bull carabao to the cart and drove with him to
Santiago. He came home in the afternoon with a load of dried molave limbs. He cut them in
uniform lengths, piled them in the yard where the rays of the sun would strike them longest.
“These are for heating your mother’s bath when she has given birth,” he explained to
Berting.
“Why?” asked Berting.
“Because the molave is hard and strong, your mother will recover her strength quickly,”
said Father.
Tia Accol, the midwife, was often at the house in those days. She chewed betel-nut
rolled in a leaf of the gawed plant with a pinch of lime, and the ground under the window
where she and mother sat talking would be streaked with many red stains from old woman’s
ceaseless spitting.
It was now the time of the misa de gallo. At dawn we walked the two kilometres that
brought us clear across the river to the town and to the mass. The late-rising moon lighted us on
our way and the cold, clear dawn rang with the rooster’s awakening song.
The tobacco plants were growing bigger and bigger. They sent out green new leaves
that spread out bravely above the large brown clods. Crickets had bitten in two the stems of
many and we had to plant new seedlings in their place.
Mother walked slowly to the fields every day and killed the worms that made moles in the
growing leaves. Father still went to Santiago, the house of Don Anchong was almost finished,
and a letter from Emilio, the son in America had said that he was on his way and would be
home by Christmas. Father would get excited telling us about it.
CALINOG CAMPUS

November 28-30
“When I grow up,” said Berting “I shall go to America and make million pesos.”
“This son of mine,” said my mother, and she sounded so loving that again I felt a great
need to be good and kind to her.
I remembered how hard she worked every day and she was getting bigger and heavier
with the child inside her and I could have cried. But soon we fell asleep and at dawn we went to
Artemio and Peddong and Inzo and the young men and women and old ones, too, to attend
the misa de gallo. How cold it was walking all the way to the church! But inside the church with
many soft-breathing people around us, it was warm and comfortable and the burning candles
were good to smell. Feeding the pig one evening, Mother spoke to it, saying, “Eat hearty, you
greedy one, you have only a few days left to this life,”
“Why, Mother?” asked Berting. He was always asking why.
“Don’t you know?” I said. “We will eat it for Pascua. On Christmas day we will make
lechon’ of it and eat it, the greedy thing,” and I thrust my arm through the bars of the pen and
scratched its belly with many a contented grunt.
The day before Christmas broke clear and cold, the sun scattering the mist atop the
Katayaghan hills and over the tobacco fields more quickly than usual.
Mother was up before everybody else in the house. She measured with a big coconut
shell the sweet-smelling diket’ for the suman’ that she would make later in the day. When Father
awoke, she told him to split open the coconuts and start grating the white, oily meat. In the
yard, Berting and I dug two long narrow trenches about knee-deep and above them the big
jars for the suman were placed.
We swept the yard, gathered the scattered rice husks and leaves of the camachile into
mounds and made smudges where we warmed ourselves. All day the air above Nagrebcan
was filled with the smoke of many trench fires where suman was being cooked. There were few
people about, for almost everyone was busy preparing for the evening . Inzo and Peddong
passed by our house to say that at nightfall they would come for us. We were going out with
bamboo flutes and bamboo drums and bamboo guitars, a star-shaped lantern, to play before
the houses of Nagrebcan. We expected a plentiful harvest of coins and suman.
But at sundown, my mother suddenly left the side of the jars of suman which she had
been stirring and with slow, dragging steps went over to the ladder. She dropped on the lowest
rung with a sharp, agonized cry and Father ran to her side, asking what was the matter in a
voice that sounded both alarmed and angry.
He carried Mother upstairs in his arms, scolding her all while, and laid her in the silid and
piled pillows behind her.
CALINOG CAMPUS

November 28-30
“Get Tia Accol,” he said and I ran out as fast as I could. From the street, I saw Tia Accol at
her window and I shouted:
“Tia Accol, come quickly, my mother is giving birth now.”
When I saw that she was getting ready, I ran back home, feeling excited and happy.
Father had removed one of the jars of suman from the fire and placed thereon another
big jar filled with water. I saw the he use for fuel the molave firewood. Berting had gone to bring
home the carabao from the fields.
Three other women came with Tia Accol. Nana’ Ikkao, Artemio’s mother and Tia Anzang
and Nana Dalen came with blankets under their arms.
“This is what you have to do,” said Tia Accol to my father. “I shouldn’t need to tell you
each time, but you have the memory of a mudfish. Keep the fire burning under that jar of water.
Prepare a new small jar and bring it to the silid. Get a wide winnowing basket

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West Visayas State University

(Formerly Iloilo Normal School)

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

Does my sassiness upset you? Does my sexiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom? Does it come as a surprise

Pumping in my living room. At the meeting of my thighs?

With the certainty of tides, I rise

Still I'll rise. I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Shoulders falling down like teardrops. I rise

Weakened by my soulful cries. Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines I rise

Diggin' in my own back yard. I rise

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

Morella's erudition was profound. As I hope to live, her talents were of no

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

It is unnecessary to state the exact character of those disquisitions which,

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

I kissed her forehead, and she continued:

"I am dying, yet shall I live."

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

Why Don’t You Dance?

His side, her side.

He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.

"It must be a yard sale," the girl said to the boy.

This girl and this boy were furnishing a little apartment.

"And for the TV," the boy said.

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

match into the grass.

could see a star.

"How is it?" he said.

"Try it," she said.

He looked around. The house was dark.

"I feel funny," he said. "Better see if anybody's home."

She bounced on the bed.

"Try it first," she said.

"How does it feel?" she said.

"It feels firm," he said.

"Kiss me," she said.

"Let's get up," he said.

"Kiss me," she said.

She closed her eyes. She held him.

He said, "I'll see if anybody's home."

Lights came on in the houses up and down the street.

reading lamp on.

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

"It's a pretty good TV," the boy said.

"Ask them how much," the girl said.

"It's a pretty good bed."

"Would you take forty?" the girl asked.

"I'll take forty," the man said.

the seal on the whiskey.

"How about the TV?" the boy said.

"Would you take fifteen?" the girl said.

"Fifteen's okay. I could take fifteen," the man said.

2023 LITERARY-MUSICAL CONTEST

sit down. I'm going to sit down on the sofa."

The boy found two glasses and poured whiskey.

She pulled out a chair and sat at the kitchen table.

The girl got up to help him find it.

"So what do you want?" the boy said to the girl.

The man waved his hand at this preposterous question.