ALMOST HALF A CENTURY SINCE CHE'S MURDER...

Humanity’s Misery for Sale

by: Cheryl L. Daytec

The compradors imprecated your fiery rhetoric

Scorning avarice that empties famine’s belly

Indicting  thirst  that lusts after  plebeian  sweat

Yes, even enslaved blood from  chocked veins

You drew lines of parity - no rich, no poor

Just humanity  eating  from the same plate

To each based on penury; from each, on gift

You preached that one’s  labor must liberate

The precariat  from  helotry to  Wall Street

On that cruel day, one hundred souls vanished

By the ruthless hands of the butler of greed

Korda’s camera arrested your pain and rage

Framed between a silhouette and a palm tree

Now frozen for the world to see… everywhere

To those who heard the clarion call, it is the face

Of  deep love for the masses who are also oneself

The face that speaks indignation  against  injustice

Against oligarchs bestriding  borders as fictions of law  

To reach last frontiers beneath the feet of first peoples

The  gold fever afflicting them does not come down

They eat  what they steal, and get even  hungrier

As their bursting patrician pockets get deeper

To the naïve and nescient, a movie icon’s face

Or, perhaps, a heavy metal band’s sex symbol

In thoughtful contemplation of the next show

To capital, nothing is sacred; even God is cash

Comrade Che, you would not believe me if  I say

Today, I saw your face on T-shirts and bikinis

Offered at  altars of the golden calf on high streets

Of Bangkok, of Manila, of London, of San Salvador

Of New York, of Sidney, of Beijing, of  Pretoria

Your enemy keeps the contours of your face  alive

Flouting the fire and  faith that resided in your soul

A cursed  thief  to sell humanity’s desolate visage

Poetry: CHILD SOLDIER

(Kathlea Francynn Gawani Yangot, my 12-year old 7th grader, came home today from school, the Philippine Science High School, and told me about a powerful documentary her class watched.  It is about the civil war in Sudan where children were its helpless casualties, she said. I told her I wrote a poem about child soldiers and promised to share it.  Here it is. CLDY)

Child Soldier

By: Cheryl L. Daytec-Yangot

Thousands of children are serving as soldiers in armed conflicts around the world. These boys and girls, some as as young as 8-years-old, serve in government forces and armed opposition groups. They may fight on the front lines, participate in suicide missions, and act as spies, messengers, or lookouts. Girls may be forced into sexual slavery. Many are abducted or recruited by force, while others join out of desperation, believing that armed groups offer their best chance for survival. 

                 -Human Rights Watch, 2013

He is only  ten according to  his birth records

But if we measure the thickness of the steel  

his  heart became, if we count the people he

mangled or killed, he  already died.  Old age.

He is that man holding a Galil. You’re younger

but he was  never your age. You fell in love; you

were not born while missiles were shaking the

fields. His  mother wept  at the miracle of his

life  in the midst of perdition. Hope. Not like

his  father’s -lived by the gun, died by the gun

Alas, out of her womb, he was not  her child  

Jolted by bombs while suckling from her breast –

became  too heavy for a  mother’s arms. Learned

to hate  before he could learn to smile. Look at his

eyes:  hollow, bloodthirsty. You ask, does he know  

there is a world where  music fills the empty

spaces in the air? Did he have half  a chance? He

heard nothing but  violence sending grounds

and the nights  quaking,  razing homes, sinking

mountains. He got deaf,  seen more: the heinous

face of  death in everyone he could  have loved

if he had your fortune. Got blind.  Got lost in the

loss of  innocence as  soldiers were pouring poison

in  rivers,  raping girls and women. He fires his

Galil; how the oppressors roar with vile pleasure.

He is one of them, but he does not know- for he

knows nothing, not even his beliefs. He is  part

of their loot. You see, as always, war is business

He is too old. Mothers say he will not grow old.

Poetry: FINDING MYSELF

by: CHERYL L. DAYTEC

Let me spread flowers
on the road I traveled
to find you
Because I should not have regrets
But between that road
and where I stand
I will plant thorns
I should not retrace my steps

Let me honor
my memories of you
By forgetting them
until their most resilient ghost
disappears
Because they comfort and hurt
I cannot trust the double-edged

Let me banish my pains
with more tears
Until I will never cry again for you 
Then I can cry when
There are other wounds
That I can heal with my tears
Or there are joys that I should celebrate

I traveled mountains and seas
To search for you
I did not find you; I found me
Before I did, I never knew I was lost
And now I know it was myself
I was looking for all along. /cld apr2013, st paul, mn, usa

THE NURSE

by: CHERYL L. DAYTEC-YANGOT

The Nurse

(for Thelma)

She came a stranger to this once-peculiar

Place. Four seasons.  Undergrounds.

Fish-and-chips. Haggis. Royal ghosts

A place whose poor are not the poorest

Back home

Her father raised the money

To grow  wings on her feet

For that better life than he ever had

But some nights, listening  to cries

Uttered in a mix of  distress and English

She would weep in her mothertongue

The walls the  audience

Of her ineffable solitude

Of her yen for home

Despite the blight of want there

Her father would say over the phone,

It will pass. Stay put

You will find there the bed of roses

I prepared you for

It will be home

He was right

The strangeness of the place

Transformed it into  home

After  she responded to the buzzer

One  thousand  times

Chronic cases

Terminal cases

She was needed here

Relevance  made a place a home

As much as  language, as much as roots

It became joy to  embrace humanity’s pain

Helping it

Fend off  the sinister man with the scythe

Or bravely confront and trounce  him

Or listen to the oft-talked about gentle  voice

Urging a soul to return to its body

As it is about to reach a dark tunnel’s end

Her heart had shed tears

As her hands pulled the zipper over lifeless faces

Imagining how crestfallen

Loved ones must be more than she was

Just yesterday before the terrible news came

She injected  morphine  into unfledged veins

Praying that  a premature journey to the other side

Would  be like the dance of an autumn leaf

To the gale, graceful  as it falls to the ground

Becoming dust one day

She had lost sleep for over a hundred patients

And kept their  names

From being carved on gravestones

Some of them still stay in touch

London became  home despite

Late night hours. Arrogant doctors’ moods

Harsh winter morning shifts. Graveyard shifts

Her father had always been proud of her

Over the phone, he would say

You have a heart several times

Bigger than  the average

Your  hands warmer than normal

Now,

At Heathrow Airport, she anxiously awaits

Her flight back home to the Philippines

To bury her father. Pneumonia. Lung cancer

Complications.  She never wiped his brows

Furrowed by pain. He never saw his daughter’s

Bedside manner, never felt the  hands

With a heart  several times  more huge

Than the average size he was so proud of

She was his daughter, everyone else’s

Nurse.

MY FATHER WOULD NOT EAT SWEET POTATOES

by Cheryl Chyt L. Daytec-Yañgot

  

My father was a World War II baby. As the last child in his family of 7 children, he knew no hardship. He never went hungry. Then war broke out. His family and the rest of the people in their indigenous community had to flee from their homes to save their lives. Life became hard and harsh. Rice was scarce. But camote (sweet potato) was easy to cultivate. And so they spent a few years as virtual war refugees in a place called Ogawi (in Besao, Mt. Province)  eating camote to survive.

I never saw my father eat the rootcrop. When I was in high school, he told me stories of the horrors of war he experienced as a child. To his young mind, the greatest horror next to the bombs exploding was eating camote all the time. "I have eaten more camote than an average man can eat for his lifetime," he said. I understood then why he would not eat it regardless of how it was prepared.  

Camote is on my list of "yummy"  foods. I was pleasantly surprised to discover  sweet potatoes being sold in the Rainbow Supermart in Minneapolis, Minnesota where I am living right now. Today I had two of them for breakfast. I boiled  and  put a lot of melted cheese over them. They  go great with hot chocolate drink (with  milk). Two days ago, I excitedly told my sister about my food find and we talked about how Dad would not eat sweet potatoes. I suggested sheepishly that   Dad, who now has Alzheimer's and has forgotten a lot of things  including his children's names,  be fed the rootcrop. If he eats it, that is a good thing; if he does not because he will remember World War II as he witnessed it during his tender years, it will be even better. It means he will have recovered his memory.

I still have to hear from Dinah. Meantime, let me share a poem I wrote years ago about Dad's aversion to camote.

Why My Father Does Not Eat Camote

Like clockwork, the green  fields transmogrified
Into harvest shining like gold  same time each year
Bowls were filled to need  (Greed was unthinkable) 
Then came trespassers  whose ways were strange
Bombs scattered terror; freedom ran to the fringes
Rice  fields primed for plenitude became fallows

Routine was shattered; hunger, once a myth, reigned
But  resilience  can perforate the most solid rock
Inside the parched earth too petrified to nourish life
Camote flourished, a rush of flood drowning despair  
They who were listlessly drifting  to the end of  days
Retraced their gaits, eager to live, to look ahead.

They ate camote
for breakfast
for lunch
for supper
Until the bombs stopped

Out of the caves, an uncircumcised lad emerged  a man
Desperate to forget the horrors dripping from war’s  fangs
But they are always, always  playing even in his aged mind.
 /September 2000

MAITA GOMEZ, 64

by: Cheryl L. Daytec 

So you were on your way to the huge hippodrome

You moved with the grace of a swan

Twenty  million  people  waited for the wave

 of your dainty hands on black-and -white TVs

That was what you were supposed to do

Alas, you rolled down the car window

The stench of  existence deterged of freedom

pervaded the air

You  looked straight into the eyes of a child

hawking her tender flesh to wrinkled  strangers

not quite comprehending her  tragedy

You saw her haggard mother

holding with one thin hand a boil-infected baby

letting go of  hope with  the other

You saw her jobless father  burn his self-deprecation

with a bottle of cheap alcohol

Hungry peasants carried full harvests to lay down

At the feet of an indolent  landlord chewing  cigar

There were millions of them

There were just a few of you

The soft bed, the flashy cars, the banquets,

The promises  of fame:   their  glitter was illusion

 Subdued by  the sudden flash of enlightenment

It was a time when opulence was a badge of shame

-an era  when hope was  heresy to  the wretched

Freedom was a  word inside  the lexicon

 devoid of form outside of it

a rhetoric of tyranny to mask injustice

a  birthright without duty-bearer

calling for  vanguards to unchain it

You heard the call the moment you knew

One cannot fully enjoy a world

that despoils the  laughter of others

So you turned the car around

Slipping out of your gown

You dropped

 the circlet of fame around  your head

the rogue lipstick into the garbage bin

It was war; you picked up a gun and rushed

 to the  battlefields - a soldier of the people

Power started to lose balance

when you and comrades cast arrows into apathy

creating a  hole through which sunshine could pass

to  grace  that young girl’s pallid life

to give her mother strength to collect hope

to put color on her father’s waxen face

You never  put down the freedom torch

You made more torches

passing  them on to the toiling masses

They found their way out of the darkness

of apathy and victimhood

To the light of consciousness

To the parliament of the streets

To the corners of the countryside

 To the slums, to the prisons

Confronting the throne

Crumbling the cornerstone of injustice

Winning victories for the oppressed class

There are  virtues more solid  than beauty

-Love for the unloved, love for the masses

Sacrifice for society’s dregs

Choosing them all,  

You turned your back on a crown of beauty,

the fancy dresses, the limelight

and became more  beautiful

Now, from where the struggle goes on

We watch you ride  into the sunset

Beautifully

as only you could/chytdaytec 14jul2012

Poem: DEFERRED ENLIGHTENMENT

DEFERRED ENLIGHTENMENT

by Cheryl L. Daytec

Love is patient, but should it be gullible, too?

Several minutes after the appointed time

A second resembles an ominous eternity

The gates are still gaping, bolts clutching

at the last hair-thin straws of their patience

The piqued microwave grudgingly stands by

to rescue carefully prepared food from cold

Sympathetic walls glow with motley reflections

Of her; he sees them with a content inner eye

Even the monochromatic curtains pirouette

With an endless stream of happy memories

He savors each one, each one, till they run out

The gardening magazine in his hand thickens

And the mundane articles seduce his attention

till his anxiety vanishes in the colorful pictures

Of course, she will arrive when she will arrive

But the gentle breeze from the open window

Diffuses a fraught whisper of rebuke, taunting,

Counting the big mugs of coffee he consumed

Counting the sticks of cigarette turned ashes

Counting the times he glanced at the clock

The times he dialed a number beyond reach

The many times he was let down in days past

Love made him forget the rudiments of math

Slowly, the wide room becomes too narrow

for the sudden flood of his tormented thoughts

The walls mutate into a boring vision of white

Till they morph into a brilliance of grim reality

With the speed of a lover tailing his beloved

He scurries to the long-agape wide gates

And locks them./ chytdaytec

Poem: BEAUTY BEFORE DEATH

The Danube River, Hungary, October 2009

Beauty Before Death

Cheryl L. Daytec

Trees dance with colors like discotheque lights

through mists of white descending from the heavens

The light about to travel to another world hesitates,

begs for more time to kiss the vivid autumn shades

like a thirsty traveler who cannot drink enough from

the spring of sweet water in the heart of the desert

But it must go and its farewell walk alters the landscape

Into another dazzling form that holds my gaze

There is an orange fire in the sky, that seems to herald

A gaiety of every form blessed with magnificence

But tomorrow, the leaves cleaving to the proud twigs

Will tumble stupefied on expectant dull earth

Multihued petals will drop down on a pile of decay

In every corner frozen branches and twigs will cling

To the trunks like the near-dead rejecting the grave

Trees will stand like ghosts too unhappy to haunt

For now let me stay mesmerized by the sight before me

With Mont Le Blanc ahead and Lake Geneva behind

Let me forget that this soul-entrancing beauty

Is a flamboyant prelude to the colors’ sad demise.

/october2007,switzerland

Visegrad, 2009

POEM IN REMEMBRANCE OF THE 1980 GWANGJU MASSACRE

(The Gwangju Cemetery where the May 18 heroes rest hopefully in peace.)

A Mother’s Last Words To Her Son: May 1980*

by Cheryl L. Daytec-Yañgot

Kim Hyo Seok was just a high school teenager that day in May 1980 when Special Forces arrived before dawn and surrounded the downtown YMCA where he and other pro-democracy protesters had barricaded themselves for several days.

Within minutes, the soldiers opened fire with their tanks and M-16s. By the time the smoke had cleared a few days later in the city of Kwangju, the official body count had passed 500. Some human rights groups have estimated the number of dead as high as 2,000.

-Juan Gonzalez, “Freedom Bid That Shames Us” (Daily News, May 17, 2005)

You went to bed a boy;

waking up to the sound of bloodbath,

you are now a man

Let me reach for the clouds

and banish them from the sky

And then perhaps you will see

the ineffable sadness inside me

My heart has become a prayer:

I am the force

to tie you down to my bosom

But in the end, a son is more than a son

Here you are, spring of my ancient bloodline,

all set to rendezvous with danger

like a stone blindly hurled into the

obsidian air, its path fluctuant

Take a cut of the bread Halmunee baked;

do not forget how peace tastes

Slip into your pocket a handful of dust

from the front yard; remember a home waits

I will join my flowers in their uprising of colors

dancing to the gale from the Yellow Sea,

rustling prayers for Spring to linger

In my bosom, I will cradle your fate

and urge the gods not to forget:

When you were an infant,

I never looked at a withering flower

On your toljabee, you chose the needle and thread

over the bow and arrow;

how you brought the sun down to my palm

on a somber winter as you ate baekseogi!

But you confront your good fortune

I saw how timidity and innocence vanished

from your eyes when the tyrant’s hand

drenched the streets and our people’s dreams

with the blood of the young and old

The darkness in Gwangju

became the lamp unto your path

A son has a mother but he has a country, too

My pride weaves into my fear

I want to say, Go now with my blessings

But even before I release you

to the summons of freedom

on this nameless day

that one day might have a name,

You seem to have already gone away…

-Gwangju, South Korea/ 16 August 2011

*The poem was first published by the May 18 Memorial Foundation in its website; Gwangju, South Korea