Merlie M. Alunan is a literary critic, essayist, fictionist, professor, poet, and translator. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Tigom: Collected Poems, Running With Ghosts, and Pagdakop sa Bulalakaw. Her body of work has been recognized by the Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. the Unyon ng mga Manunulat ng Pilipinas, through the Gawad Alagad ni Balagtas lifetime achievement award, and the National Book Awards. She is a recipient of the Suntorn Phu Award by the Kingdom of Thailand, and the Ananda Coomaraswamy Fellowship of the Sahtiya Akademi in the Republic of India. She also received the Ani ng Dangal for Literary Arts from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts.
Du’a
For Ramon Pagayon Santos
after listening to Du’a
Here words are of no use. Sound signifying without fury. Only ancient branches shaking, grass leaves rubbing against wind. Stand at the edge of the jungle or by a stream where water washes over stone. Listen. Alive among the leaves or under the rocks digging into the loam or swinging among the vines crawling under the brush the flourishing multitudes they know their kind without words without names to call them by—knowledge borne by scent color shape gesture—or sound twittered screamed whispered sighed across the vast secrecy of trees—the love call death song prayer laughter anger grief of myriad lives No words. Only infinitude of sound held in the pulse of blood diverse arrhythmic beat breath fingers flexing feet stamping dancing on the wounded earth. Stand on a street in the midst of any city among these seven-thousand islands where your name is not spoken nor any word answer to your speech. Here people can hear the hunger in your voice they could read the fear in your glinting eyes they know whether you come in peace or war, though no words are uttered. They would trade roses for your stories they would dip into the aged wine jar and drink with you cup after cup, spilling the ripened fragrance of their dreams their memories as you smile to tell them you have crossed to their mountains with a clean heart. You may hear the violins crying the voices of women praying for rain for harvest for peace mourning lost sons the malong ripped from young bodies of their daughters grain spilled and wasted on the sand that will feed no child, the cold hearths in abandoned villages. No need of words. Just listen. I gather these poor words for you, Ramon Santos, to tell you what I heard in your music. I heard the Archipelago talking--the sea the islands mountains multitudes thriving, each in their own homes, each speaking the strange tongue of its kind but yet answering to one another with the sound clarity of need in perfect understanding without words.
A Day in the Life of Rowena Guanzon
She stood in front of the Manila Cathedral, flanked by two nuns. The spectacle had attracted a little crowd, a few reporters. A row of microphones to send her voice from this tiny piece of ground in the vast metropolis, to the vaster air lanes, northward to Batanes, all the way to the southern outposts of Tawi-tawi. 2:00 p.m., Manila time. Was it noontime in New York? Breakfast time in Australia. Tea time in London, wine in Rome or Barcelona, coffee everywhere else, it did not matter. It was her time to speak. She spoke in English, understood across all geographies of the world, even in Ilocandia, where they grow tobacco on the stingy land. Where a Marcos had sprung, dead these thirty-three years now, but whose unabsolved ghost, rasps like a dull saw in the national memory. Insatiable, his living spawns would swallow whole mountains if they could. They holding us still in the grip of perpetual hunger and need, dangling a myth of gold before our gullible sight. Poverty drives us to unreason and that is how we are caged. Standing in front of God’s own edifice, she might have wanted to pull us back to truth, telling us about the lies, the deceptions, bribery and corruption, how your human rights and mine are trafficked for their greed. Do you think we listened? Did we understand? Women sweating under the sun selling hot chilis, okra and string beans by the roadsides, did they hear her words? Housewives pinching pennies for a meager measure of rice, a string of salt fish, did they listen? And what about the men and boys in warehouses and building sites, cement dust caking on their sweaty skin, hunger like rats’ teeth gnawing at their insides, could they have heard her too? Did her voice echo across the canefields of Sagay, Bais, Kabangkalan, the fish markets of Bantayan, the Taboan in Cebu, rife with the smell of dangit, ginamos hipon, buwad bolinao, ever the poor man’s fare? Did her words reach the eerie mountainsides, the villages in Mindanao, tribesfolk mourning their dead sons and daughters, their villages perished in fire, their memories pillaged by dishonor and the anger of dispossession? When she had had her say and fell silent, who would remember her speech? Only a poet whom everybody knows, is mad, not worth a thought.