Filipino guerilla-poets during the Marcos dictatorship
sketch of Lorena Barros, artist unknown, from http://www.cpcabrisbane.org
Sampaguita
– Lorena Barros
(killed in battle in the mountains of Mauban, Quezon)
This morning Little Comrade
gave me a flower’s bud
I look at it now
remembering you, Felix
dear friend and comrade
and all the brave sons and daughters
of our suffering land
whose death
makes our blades sharper
gives our bullets
surer aim.
How like this pure white bud
are our martyrs
fiercely fragrant with love
for our country and people
With what radiance they should
still have unfolded
But sadness should not be
their monument
whipped and lashed desperately
by bomb-raised storms
has not our Asian land
continued to bloom
Look how bravely our ranks
bloom into each gap
With the same intense purity and fragrance
we are learning to overcome.
* * * * *
superimposed photo of Eman Lacaba on artwork, artist unknown, from http://www.bulatlat.com
Open Letters to Filipino Artists
A poet must also learn
how to lead an attack.
-Ho Chi Minh
I
Invisible the mountain routes to strangers:
For rushing toes an inch-wide strip on boulders
And for the hand that’s free a twig to grasp,
Or else headlong fall below to rocks
And waterfalls of death so instant that
Too soon they’re red with skulls of carabaos.
But patient guides and teachers are the masses:
Of forty mountains and a hundred rivers;
Of plowing, planting, weeding and the harvest;
And of a dozen dialects that dwarf
This foreign tongue we write each other in
Who must transcend our bourgeois origins.
1 May 1975 South Cotabato
II
You want to know, companions of my youth,
How much has changed the wild but shy poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem;
You hear he’s dark as earth, barefoot,
A turban round his head, a bolo at his side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside.
Like husks of coconuts he tears away
The billion layers of his selfishness.
Or learns to cage his longing like the bird
Of legend, fire, and a song within his chest.
Now of consequence is his anemia
From lack of sleep: no longer for Bohemia,
The lumpen culturati, but for the people, yes.
He mixes metaphors but values more
A holographic and geometric memory
For mountains: not because they are there
But because the masses are there where
Routes are jigsaw puzzles he must piece together.
Though he has been called a brown Rimbaud,
He is not bandit but a people’s warrior.
November 1975 South Cotabato; Davao del Norte
III
We are tribeless and all tribes are ours.
We are homeless and all homes are ours.
We are nameless and all names are ours.
To the fascists we are the faceless enemy
Who come like thieves in the night, angels of death:
The ever-moving, shining, secret eye of the storm.
The road less travelled by we’ve taken-
And that has made all the difference:
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We all should be in time.
Awakened, the masses are Messiah.
Here among workers and peasants our lost
Generation has found its true, its only, home.
January 1976 Davao del Norte
* * * * * * * * * * *
I know. It’s Linggo ng Wika. I always make an effort, even if it’s a form of sacrilege, to translate.
Salin ng isang saknong, “Open Letters to Filipino Artists” (Mga Bukas na Liham sa mga Pilipinong Alagad ng Sining) na tula ni Eman Lacaba
Ngunit matiyagang giya at guro ang mga masa
Ng apatnapung bundok at isandaang ilog
Ng pagsasaka, pagtatanim, pag-aalaga, at pag-aani
At ng isandosenang mga wika gahigante
sa wikang banyagang nakasanayan
Tayo na kailangang lumagpas sa burgesyang pinagmulan.
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