I Teach My ChildGemino H. Abad

I.I teach my childTo survive.I begin with our words,           The simple words firstAnd last.They are hardest to learn.          Words like home,Or friend, or to forgive.These words are relations.They are difficult to bear;Their fruits are unseen.          Or words that promiseOr dream.Words like honor, or certainty,Or cheer.Rarest of sound,Their roots run deep;These are words that aspire,They cast no shade.          These are not wordsTo speak.These are the wordsOf which we consist,Indefinite,Without other ground. II.         My childIs without syllablesTo utter him,Captive yet to his originIn silence.          By every wordTo rule his space,He is released;He is shaped by his speech.           Every act, too,Is first without words.There's no rehearsalTo adjust your deedFrom direction of its words.           The words are given,

 But there's no script.Their play is hidden,We are their stage.           These are the wordsThat offer to our careBoth sky and earth,           These same wordsThat may elude our acts.If we speak themBut cannot meet their sound,They strand us stillIn our void,Blank like the childWith the uphill silenceOf his words' climb.           And so,I teach my childTo survive.I begin with our words,           The simple words firstAnd last.

The Secret LanguageMaria Luisa B. Aguilar-Carino

I have learned your speech,Fair stranger; for youI have oiled my hairAnd coiled it tightInto a braid as thickAnd beautiful as the serpentIn your story of Eden.

For you, I have coveredMy breasts and hidden,Among the folds of my surrenderedInheritance, the beadsI have worn since girlhood.

It is fifty years nowSince the day my fatherTook me to the school in Bua,A headman's terrifiedPeace-gift.  In the doorway,The teacher stood, her hairThe bleached color of corn,Watching with bird-eyes.

Now, I am Christina.I am told I can make laceFine enough to lay upon the altarOf a cathedral in Europe.But this is a placeThat I will never see. I cook for tourists at an inn;They praise my lemon pieAnd my English, which they sayIs faultless.  I smileAnd look past the window,Imagining father's and grandfather's cattleGrazing by the smoke trees.But it is evening, and theseAre ghosts. In the night,When I am alone at last,I lie uncorsetedUpon the iron bed,Composing my lost beadsOver my chest, dreaming backEach flecked and opalescentColor, crooning the names,Along with mine:Binaay, Binaay.GabuCarlos A. Angeles

The battering restlessness of the seaInsists a tidal fury upon the beachAt Gabu, and its pure consistencyHavocs the wasteland hard within its reach.Brutal the daylong bashing of its heartAgainst the seascape where, for miles around,Farther than sight itself, the rock-stones partAnd drop into the elemental wound.

The waste of centuries is grey and deadAnd neutral where the sea has beached its brine,Where the split salt of its heart lies spreadAmong the dark habiliments of Time.The vital splendor misses.  For here, hereAt Gabu where the ageless tide recursAll things forfeited are most loved and dear.It is the sea pursues a habit of shores.

Landscape with FiguresCarlos Bulosan

Homeward again under foreign stars,history was a strange gush of wind from memorythat came to echo waterfalls of those years:home to find the place lost amonggalaxies of signs.  The hills were gone.  The rivertrail was forgotten. . . Trying to remember meadowlarkand those who perished in the vanishing land(bones in the earth where our parents died poor),the journey fell into heavy tides of flowingscorn that echoed and reechoed time there.The sun was most unkind to the place:history: names of men: patterns of life:all that distant floodtide heaved and moved,breaking familiar names that immortal tongues

clipped for the heart to cry, "Home is a foreign address,every step toward it is a step toward three hundred yearsof exile from the truth. . ."        It was not homewardto the first known land, nor escapeto white sea sprays blossoming on inland shore,nor love leaping the boundaries naked in the soul,but a vast heritage of war and destruction breakingtoo soon for the living and willing to die. Life is a foreign language.  Every man mispronounced it . . .(1942)

An Introduction to DinesenMa. Fatima V. Lim

First of all, this is not a book.There are no words nor numbered pages.A woman is speaking in low tones from another room,In another house, a distant countryHer whisper close as mother'sOr lover's song warming the ear. Snow is falling.  Lightning flashes in a desert.Waves lap up and down an endless beach.When planets collide, they do not crumble.At the end of this world is another. In large halls, strangers danceWaltzing with wings and heavy hearts.You call each day by a secret name.

On porcelain jars, under the intertwining trees,Painted lovers touch tentatively, painted lips.They do not part even as you watch them. When she leaves you,Her receding figure growing large in your eyes,You will not call after her.Wise as a child weighed down by discoveries,You can bear anything.  From now on,All simple lives are legendary.You keep her fairy tales like sweetsOr stolen stones under your tongue.

SoledadAngela C. Manalang-Gloria

It was a sacrilege, the neighbors cried,The way she shattered every mullioned paneTo let a firebrand in.  They tried in vainTo understand how one so carved from prideAnd glassed in dream could have so flung asideHer graven days, or why she dared profaneThe bread and wine of life for one insaneMoment with him.  The scandal never died.

But no one guessed that loveliness would claimHer soul's cathedral burned by his desires,

Or that he left her aureoled in flame. . .And seeing nothing but her blackened spires,The town condemned this girl who loved too wellAnd found her heaven in the depths of hell.(1935)

UntitledJose Garcia Villa

God said, "I made a manOut of clay-   But so bright he, he spunHimself to brightest Day

Till he was all shining goldAnd oh,   He was handsome to behold!But in his hands held he a bow

Aimed at me who createdHim.  And I said,   'Wouldst murder meWho am thy Fountainhead!'

Then spoke he the man of gold:'I will not   Murder thee!  I do butMeasure thee.  HoldThy peace.'  And this I did.But I was curious   Of this so regal head.'Give thy name!'- 'Sir! Genius.'"To a Friend Off to One of the Many Writing Workshops in the StatesR.C. Sunico

You will need no pens to bring,no foolscap.  Lexicons and thesaurusesripen on shelves there, more oftenthan wheat on their fields. Bring only your lust and irony,a well-fitting rubber andprepare in your memory Flasks with which to capture

the first snow on the timberline,the attar of magnoliasand the unerring V of the first ducksarrowing towards a warmer dawn. Eye classrooms with suspicion.Eschew seminars and calling cards,pre-meditated allusions to writersyou have never read, now suddenlyin academic vogue. Avoid weak beer and the dead among themwho compete over the obscurities of rhyme.Be poet and sing.  Endow themwith the phosphorescences of our clime.

Andy Warhol Speaks to His Two Filipina MaidsAlfred A. Yuson

Art, my dears, is not cleaning upafter the act.  Neither is it washing offgrime with the soap of tact.  In factand in truth, my dears, art is dead center, between meals, amid spicesand spoilage.  Fills up the whitebreadsweep of life's obedient slices. Art is the letters you send home

about the man you serve.  Or the saladyou bring in to my parlor of elites.While Manhattan stares down at the soup of our affinities.  And we hear talk of coupin your islands.  There they copy lovethe way I do, as how I arrive over and over again at art.  Perhaps too it is the timemarked by the sand in your shoes, spillingsoftly like rumor.  After your hearts I lust.In our God you trust.  And it's your day off.

The Three TemptationsE. San Juan, Jr.

"What death would you desire?"She says: "A bronze death that yieldsa cloister for the heart; or that which is charter for a giant, a silver death;

or that for which one must labor:one's sacrament, that's a death of gold?" Alas, how can your pilgrim choose?Always there's the hissing of fire--On my neck creeps the salamander! But here on this steadfast groundearth whereon the mighty have fallen,gnomes choir a bronze hymn to you and yet could I but rear for myself--a giant's head far from all solitude--O how the undine's luster shall flood into my silver sepulcher!  For it is fateout of gorges between sheer cliffsthat gives us wings for pilgrimage and you who dance like a scented sylphon the winds have not, have notthe golden character of grace and should you but pray for me'a fine and private place' plucked upfor this death, my death, that's golden to you alone I give my only name--"Oh, now, what death would you desire?"She says: "There is only my embrace."