This poem is forthcoming in an issue of a literary magazine (I will share later). Please don’t reproduce or print this anywhere without my permission.
“Lugaring mahiblon, ha dughan mabug-on
Nga an Pilipinas dayuday uripon
Ay Tuna, nga ak natawohan!
Hain daw an hingpit nga at katalwasan?
Our parents, brothers and sisters are all here
But it saddens me that the Philippines is always a slave
Ah! Motherland where is your liberation?”
I am Poet-Seer, a priestess
displaced from Ybabao, Leyte, Negros,
and the ghost-red soil of Bataan.
My mother and I, we speak to the dead.
The War Makers tried to separate us
by starving her, tricking her,
but still, from across the ocean,
she taught me, with her mind,
how to read the insects and the sea winds.
I could feel her in the notes that I played
at my childhood piano,
the sunlight filtering in through yellow curtains
and dust particles suspended
in our shared grief.
My mother gave me literacy
for she taught me to read the dust,
the tea leaves, the thick clouds near the horizon.
Though she could not read books
she taught me to see the words lift from the page
so that I could read the future.
We knew the war was coming
Twenty, forty years ahead.
We saw my abyan together,
a green-eyed, mountainous tiger
camouflaged at the top of my spirit.
She ordered him to protect me.
My tiger told me to weave.
Weave out of our enemy’s grasp,
weave true tales with forgotten ones,
weave strands of DNA together
to avenge many massacres.
My abyan spoke.
“I am Hilarion.
I live with each of my descendants
who band their heads with red cloth,
Who stand up to the War Makers.
I do not live with those who go along with the War Makers.
Do not cry. You were placed within an enemy family
For good reason,” my tiger once said.
Tears in my eyes, I asked, “What is the reason?”
My tiger lowered his head and smiled.
He lined up everyone I loved before me,
including those to come, and said,
“You will lose every person that you see here.
And they will lose you to the truth.
These are the descendants of the Ilustrados
who made a blood pact and broke it.
They are descendants of the Makapili
who gave up their own people to save themselves.
There is no honor in their bloodlines.
Losing them will break you open
And liberate our family’s massacred Pulahanes.”
“But the Escobars, the Ramos family— they are not evil.
They had nothing to do with the old wars,” I said, a protective child.
My abyan said,
“Their ancestors caused traitorous harm
to the Land, the People.
The consequences of these actions
will run their course, like a tsunami that cannot be stopped,
no matter how kind the descendants are.
They had opportunities to face reality—
the origins of their affluence and greed—
and did not.
That is enough to keep the trajectory
of their lives spun
around the corkscrew needle
of a curse.”
“The Ilustrados who aligned with the Spanish elites in the Philippines,
and those few Katipuneros who accepted money from America and fled,
and those Makapili who helped the Japanese,
and those immigrants who kneel before the enemy,
begging to be accepted, those who turned
their backs on their Motherland— they
will continue to face the consequences of their actions
through every generation in their bloodline.
They will suffer cancers, legal troubles,
family disruptions, anxieties, insomnia,
money problems, and ultimately,
tragic deaths.
Stay clear of them and you will be spared of this curse.”
“I lost my first family and now I have to lose my adoptive family?” I pleaded.
He replied,
“You lost your first family so that you would remember
your past lives, encoded in the medium of pain.
Your adoptive father will be spared
health problems for he sees the face of the enemy.
But he will experience loneliness.
He will be spared a tragic death
if he cares for his adopted one.
Your birth mother will live a life
filled with love but no money,
this is her path; it is the inverse path of your adoptive father’s.
Your task is to awaken
because we have given you an opportunity.”
And so begun a decades-long unraveling
of the mind to reveal the spirit.
My initiation did not happen alone.
My abyan sent messages in dreams.
The demons came, attracted to my light
like a moth to a flame, like men to young girls.
I fought them with knives,
mental games,
trapped them in mirrors, proved myself.
Then, I dreamt of ancestors riding boats
in an upside-down river,
of women gathering before an infinite, watery horizon,
casting spells into the clear sea-womb.
My efforts were accepted. I passed the tests.
My abyan continued to help me communicate with spirits.
Diwatas and anitos echoed to me in the woods, along riverbanks and seashores.
Snakes emerged from rocks to speak to me.
I sat alone in the cemeteries under the full moon.
I saw the red-faced ones and their terrible fangs.
Shapeshifters emerged from the roots of mangroves,
the spirits of missing children tugged at my feet when I slept.
One day, spirits of the water told me that my birth father would die
after he destroyed my mother’s altar
and his son threw a Santonilyo statue,
breaking off its fragile wooden hand.
The spirit was so angered
that they pierced my father’s hand
with the spine of a thrashing stingray
through the center of the palm, salt stigmata.
He could no longer fish,
his heart was broken.
He sat on the dirt floor of the cement room
that he did not own,
struggling to breathe with an oxygen mask.
I watched as the tuberculosis took over his lungs.
It took many years for him to die.
My life and my mother’s life are filled with loss and sacrifice.
And after thirty years of study and devotion,
a diwata appeared to me in golden form.
She emerged from the night heaven
like a lantern slowly alighting.
The diwata was not alone. She brought an attendant.
Together they danced across the stage of the sky.
I took no photos. I did not record a video.
I absorbed her,
and she split me asunder
from root to pineal gland,
from toe to crown,
from the past into the future,
from formlessness to form.
She lives as a sound in the center of my crown now.
She speaks in shapes, color, sensations, she shows me
the holographic fabric that makes up our universe.
She shows me the membrane that separates us from the next realm.
Just on the other side of this membrane is a river.
From here I am lifted over the water.
She, they, we fly through blue and purple canyons,
over asteroids and cosmic dust, brilliant plasma,
until we reach a planet that she tells me is mine.
It’s a dimension created from my mind:
lavender, violet, soft pink, silvery blue,
gold, lush plants and serene waters.
This is my reward for awakening to my mother’s suffering
which is my own. But I could not accept this gift yet,
and I say why,
“My friends are incarcerated for standing by the oppressed,
for speaking the truth.
Our suffering, our work in this warped dimension is not over.”
We must refuse paradise
until we are all liberated.
We must embrace paradise on Earth
by freeing its most vulnerable people
from the aggregates: ignorance,
aversion, desire, the acids
that fuel the same imperialist beast
whose activities anger the gods of every element,
the gods of every sacred direction;
the same War Makers who robbed my birth father
of an honorable life of a fisherman;
these War Makers who vomit the food
meant for my brother and sister
who died hungry.
The Land and Sea support me.
Ginpapahimsog ako hiton kalibungan
kaupod an nga tanan nga mga umurukoy.
My ancestors protect me.
Kaupod ko an gasa han akon mga kaarugan.
My mother gave me the gift of seeing.
I see war in the mountains and beaches of the Philippines
and uprisings in the U.S.A..
My abyan tells me the anitos are frenzied, searching
for rare people who will take action
to protect the Land and precious life.
My diwatas and spirits help me affect reality.
They are more real than humans
and shitty ideas like capitalism.
Am I trembling in my boots and sablay
as I stand in the belly of this beast?
Diri ako nag–uusahan. May nag-una ha akon.
We are formidable.
In four years time we will see this beast collapse onto its knees,
unable to lift itself up to greatness again,
lapping up the sewage waste that it has created,
begging for scraps from other countries,
all of this its own doing.
The ancestors will be watching.
They tell me to prepare: to plant food,
to meditate like a monk,
to tell others that it’s time.
I am a Poet-Seer for my mother gave me her eyes,
the visions do not lie.
Nasarig ako hiton akon pagsumpay ha kalibutan.
A glass statue of the revolutionary Nieves Fernandez.
Poem note: The Waray lines in this poem are borrowed from oracions from Baba Bisaya and ate Firie, a Waray poet and special education teacher who is helping me with my Waray learning.