Cindy A. Velasquez is an associate professor at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, Philippines. An alumna of several fellowships in creative writing and art criticism, she received a National Commission for Culture and the Arts grant for Basabalak Kanunay, the poetry podcast she produces and hosts which features Bisaya poets and their works. Among her forthcoming projects include an illustrated children’s book which aims to preserve the ethnomedicinal practices and knowledge of the indigenous Ati community in Cebu Province and the anthology she edited, Dagat ug Kinabuhi: Translating Contemporary Cebuano Poetry [Sea and Life]. Also a performance poet and lyricist, Velasquez and her co-composer Jude Gitamondoc won the 43rd Gawad Urian Awards for Best Music for the song “Usa ka Libo ug Usa ka Panamilit” [A Thousand and One Goodbyes] in 2020. Her first poetry collection Lawas [Body] was published in 2016, while her second, Your Soul is Home: A Collection of Photo Haiku in Tokyo and Yamagata, was released in 2022.
As you tell me about my younger brother’s death, this house seems like a river mouth, the watercourse debouches into a sea. Then a boat is leaving to the other side of the earth. A child’s last breath marks an unmappable seascape in your memory. How the morning mourns with a mother: dismantle or burn the house in which her son died.
Five years ago, you narrated to me the story of the bones of your great grandmother, how the skeleton was removed, given a ritual cleansing in the barrio, placed in a small chest—preserved and carried it along if the family decided to move in Cebu. And you tried to remember the childhood stories of your mother during the war. Then you cried, Mama. As if I saw all your great grandmothers crying in front of me. I knew it was not about Lola. I did not know how to tame the currents within you. You were still remembering the tidal bore and erosion in the riverbank when everyone was almost near the waves of the sea.
The self is a resting place—an estuary, where the water from the river meets the sea, reminding of arrivals and departures. In the old Visayan culture, when all the healing rites failed to revive the moribund, there was one last desperate ritual to call back the departed soul. A coconut shell of water was placed on the navel while chanting, “Uli, uli, kalag.” Come back, soul, come back.
“Mama, I imagine you with those lullabies instead of those chants.”
In the afterlife, a boat will arrive, filled with stories from the childhood of your grandmothers—sinking and slowly turning it into reefs on the sea floor. Only the sea's humming and the mellow voice of my brother when he will call you Mama for the first time, shall be heard.
Your soul will always seek your womb. This world will own too many kinds of dying. But hopefully, death will be kinder than the earth.
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Author's note: Some parts of the poem regarding the old Visayan rite are based on Francisco Ignacio Alcina's Historia de Las Islas E Indios de Bisayas (1668) and William Henry Scott's Barangay: Sixteenth-century Philippine Culture and Society (1994).