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| Heartland |
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All
my life, I rove and love
This coast, that ridge, your coves
Banks and peaks; your speech
And laughter bare a dozen volumes
About you more than your titles or tales.
Having known no country but this
Benighted, having no passport
Save this surge in my veins
These plumes at my feet; and the light
In my eyes my only compass
The grunt in my guts my timepiece Hence
my schedule always goes
helter-skelter…But I have long
been accursed
With this longing to see you open
Your door at daybreak, and close it
against the chill winds.
For this ravenous craving, I blame
Or sometimes bless my mother who early
on
Traded my tender skin for the wings
Of a hawk plying the arc of blue
From my northern pueblo to Mindanao.
There’s nothing now
Moves me as love and treachery and what
Makes them bearable in my dreams: poetry.
Only this bundle I tote along like some
Ballast. Only this gives me a rudder
Through the swirling crosscurrents
In our times and rages, our fibs and
fables.
Don’t ask when I drank with Ulysses,
or saw Venus
Washed only by the foam. I have gone
Past the Strait of Surigao, not Bosporus
Atlantis nor the anchorage of the stars.
Having imprinted my toes on these
Shores, I envy now your self-exile. |
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| Banawe
Rice Terraces |
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So,
bring this, my friend, to redeem
The bright green! bold brown! and the wild
Constant blowtorch of foggy morning sun
That blazed the paddies of this mountainside.
When we were there, caprice was nowhere
In the surge of pigments native there. Isn’t
it
A far cry from these blinking neon bulbs now
Boasting of painted women in their pit?
O, memory flashes back a figure crouching:
Near a lush edge of grass of one turning
Terrace, that woman squeezed into the mud
Her toes, hands, all her share of seedlings
As her day’s sweat was betrothed to
the sod…
While the tapestry of her dreams unfurled
Like the alchemy of dawns, from mud tinge
To green of buds to mellowing gleam of gold
In this primal ceremony of growing grain
On terraces, supreme shrine of her ancestors.
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