“Why did being Filipino include so much pain and                                                suffering?”

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                                     “Where’s the patis?”

 

 

1

She was one of the few

Who made it their duty to remember,

Who conquered time by transcribing it,

Who refused oblivion by the rigors

Of thought and speech.

 

Precocious colegiala rising from 

Reading proof to adept, 

She talked to us by the printed word,

With faith and finesse in our borrowed tongue,

Telling us of the lost Ermita, 

Next to the rich enclave of Malate,

The hermit’s beach a still pastoral outpost

By the bay, where beyond the rise

Of ocean the radiant sun of Amaterasu

Coveted the kundiman sunset.

 

2

Daughter and widow of war and history,

Linked by the accidents of love and affinity

To the two faces of our Revolution,

Marrying a descendant of Rizal,

And later a descendant of the widow of Bonifacio

(Widowed by the Japanese War in-between),

She lamented why being Filipino 

Included so much pain and suffering,

Imposed from outside as much as self-inflicted:

 

Why our constant hungers and inadequacies,

Nothing suffices, not even the best:

We gild every lily, can’t stand empty spaces,

We fill every silence: Please pass the patis.

 

3

The younger among us could only be awed

By the keen surveyor of our manners.

Unsparing in her censure of our foibles and excesses,

Critical of our disregard for the past,

Careful to point out our own failures 

And ironies, she constantly reminded us of our

Slavish devotion to our old masters,

Yet cautioned us that no matter our lament

For our lost Self, and searching for it by escape and

Wanderlust, it is only and truly within us.

 

4

She had access to the Dictator and wife

And while watching on TV the long cortege 

That overflowed the streets, the slow

Weeping funereal dance for the Widow

Who became president, felled by illness,

The Dictator lamented how the people could be

So ungrateful, “After all we had done for them.” 

 

In recall, she wrote, At that moment I knew

It was the Dictator who died. The people had found

Themselves in grief. He was lamenting himself. 

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