Stonehenge (con't)

Like the turtle who wanted to be like the heron,
Life is a game of flight and fetters

That fortunately we will not leave to the decree of the stars
But which we might be entrusting so much

To the light of prayer and faith we grew up with
Or the newfangled and harsh lenses and scalpels of science.

Now, as we circle the remaining stones of Stonehenge
And the wind of the coming winter brushes our cheeks,

The stones and meadow seem stunned in the silence.
My fellow visitors walk but they are motionless.

Someone is talking but there is no voice. Cameras
Snap but there is no click. The fog slowly descends

And before me pass the undulating parade
Of pestilence and wars of our own making, black and white

Pictures issuing from the hard surface of stones:
The soundless blast and disintegration of towers and bridges

Mute military armor scarping fields and gardens,
Pale, crumbling pillars and headless saints,

Or the drowned sobs of hungry infants…
And ending with the image of Proteus astride his dolphins,

Shifting shape to avoid uttering the truth
He should have said it, long ago. He should have stopped

The ancestor of the lizard rising from the cursed land
To remind him of the loss of paradise among fish.

Translated from the Filipino by
Marne Kilates

That these are shrines for solstice rites,
Where nubile maidens dance

Or old crones mutter and rant at the sky when the sun
Is most pregnant at the height of summer or in the dead of winner

And we equate this to the function of each building we construct
In the trade and commerce of our lives

Or the impact on public relations of a mountain’s decapitation,
The death of springs and waterways in the advent of cables and highways.

But what if they only wanted to initiate the mountain?
What if one day their poet-king awoke

And spoke? I dreamed I was making a mountain
They were in the middle of a war then

But the poet-king conferred with the enemy
And in the noblest words and metaphors told them

His dream. The angels must have come to his help
For everyone agreed to stop the fighting and the killing.

Forget the remote cause of the endless killing.
And help each other make real the proposal of the poet-king

All of themselves they gave to searching for and rolling the stones
And so they forgot all about conflict, pasture and field

Thrived and flourished, and in ten centuries
They were able to raise a Mountain of Peace

MARNE