...and Hunger
While our ezine does not have definite themes that dictate the subject matter, topic, or thesis of an issue, poems invariably reach a confluence, like rivulets coming together in a puddle. Like the last, it became a “summer” issue simply because poems were written during that season, and the Easter poems were the poems of a sweltering afternoons. Perhaps it was the heat, or the memory of heat, and all the layers upon layers of association underneath, until one discovered that one’s memory is precisely that of a cool afternoon. Then the memory becomes exhilaration. Or, the memory of joy or pleasure is underlined by something different. In contrast with or contradictory to what is happening around us.
In fact, this issue is a coming together of "contradictory" themes. Can beauty and ugliness, joy and fear, abundance and hunger, exist side by side? Sure, we see them staring at us daily—in august halls or dumpsites, in the explosion of real estate and garbage, in nature's simultaneous magnificence and tragedy, as we contemplate its vistas and the apparent senselessness of catastrophe. How beautiful, for instance, poignant, full of tender sentiment, is a father’s leave-taking from a child who may or may not see or know him in the future? What are the forces that impinge on a life, its choices and directions? How do they lead or influence that life to love and kill at the same time?
Our contemplation gives life, or beauty, the voice of protest, against the shackles that bind. As when love has been too long absent that, as Jose F. Lacaba writes, it has become “an embarrassing thing, so old-fashioned.” Or the horrendous death by mutilation of a subjugated people, whose memory lurks underneath monastery grounds in Eastern Europe, the graveyard of “those who have chosen to die / With precious clarity in the heart.” Or the cities and citadels that hunger builds, the fortifications of loneliness.
Still, poetry or art does not make things happen as Auden said, not as a complaint but a statement of fact. Poetry may reflect or comment on life, but it can only resolve contradiction (not conflict) in its own contemplative, imaginative domain of peace, where no politician or warmonger, out of ignorance, arrogance, or fear (for the life he knows), dares tread.
This issue owes much to the book, Sonetos Postumos (Posthumous Sonnets), by National Artist Rio Alma. We take four sonnets and three accompanying paintings by another National Artist, Ang Kiukok, from there. It is a uniquely conceived book that crosses cultures by visiting, physically and spiritually, places and sites in the Holy Land, and taking off from them to comment on contemporary death and, it seems, the unlikeliness of a resurrection.
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Bata ng Ulingan by Ben RazonOf Children Dying by Hunger
Negros and elsewhereHunger builds a citadel of sadness
In the eyes, glazed rampart of vision
Closing in upon itself, excluding all stars,
Impenetrable to all sparks of seeing.
Hunger gnaws upon itself like cancer
Or consumption, calcifying or decaying
Into that state of nothingness
That wants to be us all.
Pleas do not mock us with such sightless
Recrimination. The morsel you salvage
From that still famished bowl of ration
No sea of charity can multiply into loaves;
Your thirst no jars of Cana can slake,
Nor juice from the drying canefield
Of the labors of your fathers perish,
Nor arrogance of your caciques annihilate.
Neither can anger compensate
Or assuage innocent grief, nor pyramids
Of incomes and economics explicate
The depths of stillness in your stare.
No. You will not spare us from
The inquisition of the scream in your guts,
Because in you we face the poverty
Of our fulmination and knowledge.
Let the politicians and sociologists
And poets debate the origin and culmination
Of your grief, but no promise nor statistic
Nor esthetic can compass the configuration
Of your need. You permit us only witness
The bloodless violence slowly inflicted
Upon your being, the wilting and shriveling
And crumbling of your spirit.
But beyond the rampart of your vision
Impenetrable to all sparks of seeing,
You will not allow us visit your citadel of sadness.
Marne L. Kilates
from Children of the Snarl & Other Poems
(Aklat Peskador, 1988)
Dogma by Dante PerezRio Alma
Sa Altar ng Megiddo
Naglalaway ang utal na sakristan
Sa piging ng diyos ngayong araw ng pangilin:
Isang letsong dangal ng taga-Silangan,
At tatlong mabagal na putaking inahin,
At sansakong bagong bayong milagrosa,
At bandeha ng peskado, gisado, metsado, morkon,
At bilao ng kalamay, suman, buko, bibingka,
At buwig ng saging, kumpol ng mangga't santol,
At garapon ng haleang ube, kundol na minatamis,
At pumpon ng amarilyo, sanggumay, sampaga,
At tason ng burong talangka, atsarang dampalit,
At saka meron pang labanos, mustasa.
Sayang at ipinagbabawal ang alay na birhen,
At pansabog na lamang sa adobo ang laurel.
Para kina Vim at Bob A.
Before the Altar of Megiddo
Even the lisping altar boy would drool
At god’s sinful feast this day of fast:
Roasting pig the pride of Eastern folk,
And three fat, clucking hens,
And a cavan of newly-pounded milagrosa rice,
And trays of pescado, guisado, mechado and morcon,
And a winnowing basket of rice sweets, young coconut,
And a full bunch of bananas, clusters of mango and santol,
And jars of taro cake, candied gourd,
And clutches of marigold, vanda, jasmine,
And bowls of fermented baby crab, pickled dampalit,
And radishes and mustard, too!
Alas, sacrificial virgins are now taboo,
And laurel is just condiment for adobo stew.
For Vim and Bob A.
(Translation by Marne L. Kilates)
Ang Kiukok's Fishes. (Top) Fish in Net, from Mr. & Mrs. Paulino Que Collection. (Middle Left) White Fish Skeleton, from Joey de Leon & Eileen Macapagal Collection. (Middle Right) Fish on Yellow Table, from Mr. & Mrs. Que Collection. (Bottom) White Fish, from Mr. & Mrs. Eduardo A. Bangayan Collection