I was cleaning some stuff when I found this one I wrote back in May of 2005. I don’t actually write a lot in Filipino. This one’s untitled.
Minsan, sinusubukan ng panulat kong
magtae ng mga salita.
Pilit hinahasa ang bolpen,
sinasaid ang tinta.
Karaniwan, gusto kong ubusin
ang mga pahina ng aking notbuk.
Kayurin nang husto ang manipis
ngunit pinong papel.
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This poem is from Ntozake Shange, one of my favorite women writers. It’s from her book Nappy Edges. Napapanahon kaya ipo-post ko rito.
With No Immediate Cause
by: Ntozake Shange
every 3 minutes a woman is beaten
every five minutes a
woman is raped/every ten minutes
a little girl is molested
yet I rode the subway today
I sat next to an old man who
may have beaten his old wife
3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago
he might have sodomized his daughter
but I sat there
cuz the men on the train
might beat some young women
later in the day or tomorrow
I might not shut my door fast
enough push hard enough
every 3 minutes it happens
some women’s innocence
rushes to her cheeks/pours from her mouth
like the betsy wetsy dolls have been torn
apart/their mouths
menses red split/every
three minutes a shoulder
is jammed through plaster and the oven door/
chairs push thru the rib cage/hot water or
boiling sperm decorate her body
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I was going thru the files in my pc last night (a usual tactic to delay my writing projects) and I saw these poems I wrote back in college. Most of them well, what can I say, uhm autobiographical. Some were from the glut of my imagination. I decided to post two of them here and risk damnation.
Tied-up young
sometimes, I just wanna slow it down a bit and feel the vacuity
of things, the small, irreparable things free mortals take for granted.
i miss that when I have all the rubbish I need for the day.
i miss screwing around coz I’ve got no money and the baby needs milk
while his dad needs some cooing and pampering like an old self-indulgent kid.
Kahit saang panahon ata tumatagos ang mga titik na ito ni Walt Whitman.
Walt Whitman
I Sit And Look OutI sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband–I see the treacherous seducer
of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be
hid–I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny–I see martyrs and
prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea–I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill’d, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these–All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look
out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
This poem by Sylvia Plath is for all women who have journeyed beyond the realm of the woman as a wife, mother and bearer of life. Mga neng, mabuhay kayo!
Barren Woman
by Sylvia PlathEmpty, I echo to the least footfall,
Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.
In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,
Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies
Exhale their pallor like scent.I imagine myself with a great public,
Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.
Insread, the dead injure me attentions, and nothing can happen.
Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.