Clouds the Color of Bruises
Lina Sagaral Reyes
1
The current of marchers’ feet
Was of tidewaters rushing out.
The surge flung you off the curbstone.
But because your feet and theirs
Knew the same direction, you kept pace
Along the warps of the street.
There was grace and silent music
In the way you all bannered your fists.
Lowered and raised,
Lowered and raised,
Like blunt spears of intentions.
2
We were mapping your life before this march.
You did not say you were lost.
Only that you did not know where to go.
Maulap, you said. You were not looking at the sky.
Have you an umbrella?
To a march one brings
Only what is useful, you said.
Umbrellas will not shield us
From the evil bullet.
Teargas seeps sharply through nylon.
But what if it rains?
3
You counted your new losses.
Ours, you said.
Seventeen young farmers dead.
It was not loss I saw.
It was rage. Your hands
That once were weeping hands
Now refused to close.
You were hurt, too, at Mendiola?
You laughed, “just a bruised ankle.”
You showed me the slightly clouded flesh.
I am still whole, can’t you see
It was just a bruise, a superficial hurt.
4
I could not be with you in this march.
And saying this to you hurt us both.
I have this story to write, I said.
Of this first lieutenant who, in Samar,
Found rebels among the fallen
Coconut trees and dead children.
He is now honored to guard
The woman president and her daughters.
It is his story I must write.
A wide sky, I tell you, a wide sky
This paining.
It has clouds the color of bruises.
September 27th, 2006 at 4:32 am
tangina. wasak ‘yun, a. di ako pamilyar sa makatang ‘to, pero wasak talaga ‘to. may kopya ka ba ng libro niya?
October 11th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Hay, I had to google that Tagalog word, “wasak”.
The poem is old; the poet, too.
So you young one don’t know her. Plus she’s more of a poem reader now than a poet. Writing poems like this, for her, happened lifetimes ago. An ex-poet, she is, most likely. It has been two decades since she last wrote the semblance of a poem.
Reportage becomes her now.
But indeed she remembers being “high,” drunk with activism, country, poetry and the love for a man as intense as she was for whom she wrote this particular poem. For the form, she borrowed/stoled from the Native American poets.
Her book is sold online at prices she can never afford and it looked like there were buyers.
Are You, Mikael, the one who wrote that poem about the disappeared? Yung naka-paskil sa SIM webpage for a very long time? Yun, wasak, din yun, ano? Di ko kilala ang makata pero kilala ko ang galing ng tula na yun dahil nalaman ko minsan paano ang mawasak. ‘Tangina, no?
December 11th, 2008 at 11:34 am
Blogwalking ..
nice posting i found here,.. thanks for the info