1. In the near future, what brand of drones or bombs will be dropped by the US on some Third World Country?
2. What brand of rubber-stamps will the military industrial complex be using in the White House to destroy world peace?
3. What breed of attack dogs will the US government unleash to try to silence the indigenous Americans from opposing corporate expansion on their sacred grounds?
For each question, there are only two very possible answers to choose from: a) Republican; and b) Democrat.
(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
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
(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
He’s been dead for 22 years, having died in Honolulu, Hawaii on Sept. 28, 1989, at the age of 72, but Ferdinand Marcos haunts us still. The most recent manifestation of the ghost of atrocities past came in the form of his children’s pushing a resolution in the House of Representatives, with former Marcos acolyte Congressman Salvador Escudero as pointman, asking the Aquino III administration to allow the burial of the Marcos corpse in Manila’s Libingan ng mga Bayani (Heroes’ Cemetery).
The apparently well-orchestrated campaign provoked a three-month-long debate, one of the wonders of it being that there should have been a debate at all, and the other that of the hero’s burial for Marcos being supported by Vice-President Jejomar Binay.
A human rights lawyer in a previous life, Binay had been asked by President Benigno Aquino III, who declared that he was "too biased" to decide it objectively, to help him (temporarily) settle the issue. In his most recent reincarnation, however, Binay is more a likely presidential candidate in 2016 than anything else.
Given not only the Marcos name’s continuing popularity in certain northern Luzon provinces, but also the infinite possibilities the family’s vast wealth offers, Binay’s support for his burial at the Libingan wasn’t too surprising after all, except insofar as it indicated how much ambition can drive that creature known as the Filipino politico into making deals with anyone, including the devil himself.
As far as principles rather than expediency’s concerned, however, at the heart of the debate was disagreement over the definition of "hero" and what exactly Marcos did in his near-lifetime reign as President to this country and its people.
Marvel Comics and pop culture equates heroism with personal courage. But that’s only as far as the comics are concerned. Personal courage may have something to do with heroism, but even more importantly involves the capacity to transcend the self and even to die in the service of country and nation.
Assuming the sincerity, untarnished by self interest, of his and his family’s supporters, their argument that Marcos was indeed a hero seems to be based on Marcos’s supposed World War II record, even more specifically his accumulation of 32 medals from both the Philippine and US governments. Unfortunately for his partisans, Marcos’s ever getting those medals has been debunked often, by, among others, former Congressman Bonifacio Gillego, who published his findings that the medals were bogus during the martial law period in We Forum, for which act the newspaper was shut down for "subversion."
Marcos’s medals, however, are less at issue than the way he governed this country. If heroism is more than courage, but even more importantly consists of acting in behalf of others, and as a form of unselfishness that transcends self-interest, then Marcos is no hero. His acts as President were hardly unselfish, and on the contrary focused on remaining in power and on self-aggrandizement. In behalf of that intent he placed the country under martial rule, unleashed the military on the citizenry, over a hundred thousand of whom were illegally arrested and detained, of which over 10,000 were tortured, with hundreds summarily executed and forcibly disappeared.
Among the consequences of the Marcos despotism is the military’s transformation into a major political player whose allegiance is until now crucial to the survival of governments. It has also become a power unto itself, as well as a vast center of corruption and lawlessness.
If these were Marcos’s only offenses they would suffice to consign his corpse to some other place than a heroes’ cemetery. But there was more, among them the rapid impoverishment of the country, the world-class corruption and theft of the country’s resources and treasury, the murder of its best and brightest sons and daughters, the country’s descent into chaos, violence, and barbarism.
Thankfully Mr. Aquino III has rejected the Binay recommendation. It would have been more than ironic if he had not, his father having been not only among the many victims of Marcos’s unbridled lust for pelf and power, but also an authentic hero for giving his life to the anti-Marcos resistance. If hero Ninoy Aquino truly was, how can his adversary be a hero as well?
That the question doesn’t seem to have been asked is a failure of both logic as well as knowledge. But the latter failure is rooted in an even greater error: the absence of closure on the Marcos and martial law period through a national, mass understanding of what happened during those terrible years.
It’s been said before, but deserves restating. The failure -- the refusal and fear -- of the governments that succeeded Marcos’s to put together an authentic truth commission that would provide the country an authoritative and documented account of the events, the root causes, the number of dead, disappeared, and tortured, and the people responsible for the martial law period, as well as an authoritative evaluation of it -- these have prevented closure to that period. That failure continues to provoke the most meaningless debates on Marcos and the martial law period as well as the most ignorant claims, among them -- as if there were something heroic in construction and in pretending to be a war hero -- the suggestion that Marcos was a hero because of his 32 medals and his having built roads and bridges.
In South Africa and Chile and in those other countries that lived through and survived the dictatorships the United States put in place in Latin America in the 1970s, truth commissions have established what really happened. They have identified as people’s heroes those who fought back, and the villains those who murdered and tortured in behalf of the greed for wealth and power of local and imperial interests.
By making the truth about authoritarian rule available, these commissions have enabled their peoples to achieve closure and to move on. Neither closure nor moving on has been possible in the Philippines as far as the martial law period is concerned because there is no single, independent, and authoritative account of what happened, why it happened, who suffered for it, and who were responsible. That is why the ghosts of Marcos and of that most terrible time in modern Philippine history so identified with him haunt us still. #
Demanding an immediate ceasefire in Libya, including an end to the current attacks against civilians, which it said might constitute “crimes against humanity”, the Security Council this evening imposed a ban on all flights in the country’s airspace — a no-fly zone — and tightened sanctions on the Qadhafi regime and its supporters.
-UN Security Council, 17 March 2011
Rebels in eastern Libya say their forces have been mistakenly hit in a NATO air raid on a rebel tank position…"What remains clear is that Nato will continue to uphold the UN mandate and strike forces that can potentially cause harm to the civilian population of Libya," said the (NATO) in a statement.
-BBC, 7 April 2011
Only the cries of surrender from broken dreams and the shouts of triumph of pseudo-victors could traverse the skyway along with the winged steel dropping desultory verdicts on who lives or dies The borders of an empire were sealed by interlopers Armless, weightless, the indigenes have been tuned out Too impotent, Too shriveled to count for much In the show of force between a perdurable tyrant and ruthless invaders Not even I who watches from a safe distance could no more reconcile your rhetoric for peace with the carnage you pushed to nest upon that land squatting on oil that bewitches esurience./ chyt16april2011
On 16 March 2003, 23-year old Rachel Corrie was murdered when she was crushed to death by a bulldozer operated by the Israeli Defence Force. She used her body as a human shield to stop the IDF from demolishing the home of a Palestinian family in the Gaza Strip.
To date, Israel still pursues its aggressive acts against the Palestinians. Notwithstanding more than fifty United Nations General Assembly resolutions condemning its acts, its policy of extermination directed against the Palestinians continues to escalate. How ironic that Israel is the first to forget the lessons from the Holocaust.
Who ever said that the oppressed of today can become the tyrants of tomorrow must have been thinking of the Israelis.
Death for Liberty (In memory of Rachel Corrie)
by Cheryl L. Daytec
I have gone, but my spirit stays Not mine to own like my body It belongs to a drawn-out struggle That refuses to succumb To guns on children’s heads To power unleashed by the Devil To bulldozers that turn homes into graveyards To a false ideology that believes God is the Commander-in-Chief of the army of racism of hatred of genocide
We fall…on our blood, on our grief But from them you rise Like the waves at sea I, those before me, those after me We live… still, because we never really died Flesh decays; a revolution does not We lend our death to the force of life flowing through the veins of a struggle against chains against walls against invisibility Let our death add to the heat in the fire crawling through the darkness ruled by the iron hand of ruthlessness that feeds on the poverty of a people’s spirit that drinks from the spring of apathy and surrender
Let our spirit live in the slogans We have died That the world may see the picture Hidden under layers of untruth That the walls may crumble down That the gates may open
We have died That liberty may live. cldy/16mar2011
Today, the world starts a three-day mourning for the victims of the Israel-authored 2009 Gaza Massacre that claimed the lives of innocent civilians, many of them children.
No one from the authors of the massacres has been made to pay. Meantime, Palestinian children are languishing inside prison walls. Their crime: they were forced to grow up too quickly to the horrors of a war without a cause committed on their parents, their relatives, their neighbors, their playmates, themselves.
Dodo is 3. He is my friend's nephew. He lives in Gaza. He can tell the difference between the sound coming from an air strike and a baby's holler. When the planes strike, he knows he must seek cover. For him and the other children in his situation, I wrote this poem inspired by news on the prosecution of young Palestinians forwarded by Dildora.
The BOYS UNDER INDICTMENT (for Dodo)
(A)n average of 9,000 Palestinians are prosecuted in two Israeli military courts in the West Bank each year, among them an average of 700 children, some of them as young as 12. -Maan News Agency, 2 November 2009
While they were sleeping Under covers of innocence You abstracted their dreams Of legends that spring from grandmothers’ laps The smell of milk from their mothers’ breasts The fishing trips with their fathers Eager to see their sons grow into men You smuggled nightmares Into the depth of their slumbers Screaming they awoke in the night The lullabyes were drowned By exploding bombs and shouts of rage Infancy leapt past midmorning Into the burning heat of an angry noon
Tell me: How does a three year old Come to comprehend death Before he knows how to count his age? How does a boy learn to pull the trigger of a gun Before his hand can write his name? Why does he know the killing fields so well But does not know how a karaoke bar looks?
I see tired old men in young boys’ gawky bodies March slowly till they disappear inside prison walls Shadows fading away from the wall When the lights are turned out suddenly Helpless without the guns thrust into their arms By your politics strange to conscience Victims who must suffer the guilt Of boundless power that bloodshed never sates.
The Wind That Shakes The Barley is a very moving ballad written by Robert Dwyer Joyce, an Irish poet and professor of English literature. It is about an Irish revolutionary saying his final farewell to his beloved, as he was joining the resistance movement against British colonization. Caught between his love for the woman and his love for the Motherland, he chose the latter. After all, as the Filipino revolutionary Andres Bonifacio said, what love could be greater than love for one's Motherland? This young man must have been all too aware that by choosing to join a revolution, he was also choosing to die. And he had to say goodbye to his sweetheart for the last time. Now I am being too sentimental here. The song is both distressing and rousing. Read the lyrics while you listen.
The ballad was inspired by the Irish Rebellion of 1798 which was the climax, at that time, of the Irish struggle for independence from British rule. Many patriots joined the resistance movement. The revolutionaries would carry barley oats in their pockets for sustenance while engaged in the battlefields. According to Wikipedia, "this gave rise to the post-rebellion phenomenon of barley growing and marking the "croppy-holes," mass unmarked graves which slain rebels were thrown into, symbolizing the regenerative nature of Irish resistance to British rule."
The rebellion was quashed. Many revolutionaries were massacred, civilians were slaughtered, women were raped, villages were burned. The failure of the rebellion was one thing, but the heroism of the men who gave up their lives for freedom from "foreign chains" was another. It continues to inspire all freedom-loving peoples everywhere and the Irish in their unwavering quest for independence.
My friend Butch Espere (aka Alex Munoz, the poet) called my attention to the ballad saying that it could be an inspiration for a poem. I played it over and over again. I was not kindled to write a poem (Butch caught me at a very "un-artistic" time), but I was impelled to surf the net for more information about the Irish struggle for independence of which I knew little. I came out of the experience richer in knowledge and more driven to advocate freedom.
Says Butch: "The wind that shakes the barley is an idiomatic phrase that has become part of the Irish language as early as right after the failed Sein Finn rebellion, the one led by Guy Fawkes...before the Irish rose against the British in the Gunpowder Plot. The phrase was more about the barley that grows almost anywhere in Ireland...but after the failed Gunpowder Plot, it was more about the wind that kept shaking the barley, symbolizing ...the regenerative element of Irish rebellion. It is more about the wind that kept fanning the flames of the Irish revolutionary spirit...as to nurse a rebellion that might have been quelled many times over but, nonetheless, refuses to die."
A 2006 film by Ken Loach borrowed the title. The film is set during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922–1923) and explores the story of two brothers who joined the Irish Republican Army to fight for Irish independence from the United Kingdom.
I did not watch the film but I promised myself I would. Maybe I can do it this Christmas break in between work and work. The film, said to be Loach's most successful, is internationally acclaimed having bagged the Palme d'Or at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival.
Listening to the ballad, I reflected on the life of Bonifacio, the renowned Filipino revolutionary who consecrated his life for the liberation of his people from foreign bondage. We celebrated his birth anniversary last November 30. His was a spirit no different than that of the Irish who was ready to give up the love of a woman, however painful it was, to embrace the cause of freedom.
The article Rage sent shivers down my spine. I read it midnight of last night. And I was unable to sleep. I have heard people recount torture ordeals. I read about the Martial Law torture chambers. I was incensed. But last night I wept. Maybe it is because I finally received news -however heartbreaking- about Sherlyn and Karen, the two students who were abducted two years ago. I never met these two women, but I sometimes seriously wondered about them. At the time of their abduction, one was in an advanced stage of pregnancy. What happened to the baby? No one answered this yet.
Today, I was too depressed to do anything productive other than lecture in school. It was a good thing I had an online chat at past 8 tonight with another human rights lawyer and we processed our grief and comforted each other. The article affected her, too, in the most elemental way.
When there was a discussion on my poem His House Was Raided By The Army, a lawyer shared the experience of her client who was tortured but escaped. I commented that the client was lucky they kept him alive. The lawyer said, "I am not sure if lucky is the right word. He will be scarred for life.
After reading Rage I regret my statement. I am caught between hoping the Unelected President Arroyo's Terrorism Agents will kill the victims and praying they are kept alive. To kill them is appallingly cruel. To keep them alive is equally so.
RAGE By Patricia Evangelista "Rebel Without A Clue" Philippine Daily Inquirer
THIS is the story of one Raymond Manalo, farmer, who disappeared on Feb. 14, 2006 with his older brother from their farm in San Ildefonso, Bulacan. Manalo was neither activist nor rebel when he disappeared. He escaped more than two years later. He says there are many, many more like him.
* * *
They put you in a cage four feet by one foot small, the height of an average man. There are hollow blocks to the side and iron grills in front. You sit with three other men, crouched in a line. There is no other way to fit.
Your brother is in the same cell. The door opens, more of them come in. More of them like you—beaten, bruised, helpless. They are put inside the next cell. This time there are two men and a married couple. The woman has burns all over her body. She was raped, they tell you. She was raped and beaten until she soiled herself. They say she has gone mad. They take her away.
This is where you shit, where you piss, where you wash if you still care. You do not feel the wind; you do not see the sun. Your food comes rarely, and what comes is rotten, leftover pig feed. Three men arrive, from Nueva Ecija. They are tortured. One of them has both arms broken. Bleeding.
Sometimes, when the soldiers are drinking, they take you out of your cage and play with you. The game varies, but it is usually the same. Two by fours, chains, an open gardening hose shoved down your nose. You crawl back to your cage, on your hands and knees. You wake up to screaming, to the sound of grown men begging, and you wonder which one it is this time. Sometimes, one of your cellmates will disappear. Sometimes, they don’t come back.
Then they take you away, and there is a doctor, pills, antibiotics, a bed. They tell you they are taking you home to see your parents. You meet the man they call The Butcher, and he tells you to tell your parents not to join the rallies, to stay away from human rights groups, that they would ruin your life and your brother’s. He tells you, this small man in shorts, that if you can only prove you’re on his side now, he would let you and your brother live. He gives you a box of vitamins, and tells you that they are expensive: P35 per pill.
They put a chain around your waist. The military surround your farm. Your mother opens the front door crying, and hugs you. You tell them what you were told to say. You hand them the money Palparan told you to give. Then you are told you must go.
Always, you keep thinking of escape. You make yourself useful, to make them trust you. You cook. You wash cars. You clean. You shop. No task is too menial. And one day, while you sweep the floor, you see a young woman, chained to the foot of a bed. Her name is Sherlyn Cadapan, she tells you, Sports Science, University of the Philippines Diliman, the same Sherlyn who disappeared from Hagonoy, Bulacan on June 26, 2006. She says she has been raped.
Later, you meet Karen Empeño, also from UP, and Manuel Merino, the farmer who rushed to save the two girls when they were abducted. Karen and Sherlyn are in charge of washing the soldiers’ clothes, you and Manuel and your brother Reynaldo wash the car and carry water and cook.
The five of you are taken from camp to camp. You see the soldiers stealing from villagers. You see them bringing in blindfolded captives. You see them digging graves. You see them burning bodies, pouring gasoline as the fire rose. You see them shoot old men sitting on carabaos and see them push bodies into ravines. And in April 2007, you hear a woman begging, and when you are ordered to fix dinner, you see Sherlyn, lying naked on a chair that had fallen on the floor, both wrists and one tied leg propped up.
You see them hit her with wooden planks, see her electrocuted, beaten, half-drowned. You see them amuse themselves with her body, poke sticks into her vagina, shove a water hose into her nose and mouth. And you see the soldiers wives’ watch. You hear the soldiers forcing Sherlyn to admit who it was with plans to “write a letter.” You hear her admit, after intense torture, that it was Karen’s idea. And you see Karen, dragged out of her cell, tied at the wrists and ankles, stripped of her clothing, then beaten, water-tortured, and burned with cigarettes and raped with pieces of wood. And it is you who are ordered to wash their clothes the next day, and who finds blood in their panties.
And you are there, on the night they take away Manuel Merino, when you hear an old man moaning, a gunshot and the red light of a sudden fire.
* * *
The day Raymond Manalo and his brother Reynaldo escaped was the day he promised himself they would pay, all of them who tortured Karen and Sherlyn, who killed so many, who tortured him and his brother until they begged and pleaded. They were pigs, he says, those men were pigs. If he escaped, they told him, and if they couldn’t find him, they would massacre his family. And if they do not answer to the courts here, they will answer to God.
They can still kill him, he says. But even if they do, it is too late. He’s told his story.
On Facebook which is virtually the only (with rare exceptions) place - if it is that- where my very hectic schedule permits me to socialize, I posted my poemHis House Was Raided By The Army. I wrote this after listening to a Northeast Indian (who must remain unnamed for security reasons) relate his 1990's experience as a human rights defender and the depressing (Sorry, folks, but I really use this word often.) situation in his homeland Manipur which, I think, mirrors the depressing situation in our own. If we have our Oplan Bantay Laya, his people have the Armed Forces Special Powers Act. The poem was written before the murder on 17 November of Manipur journalist Rishikanta seemingly by state security personnel. The murder serves to justify and exacerbate the anger in my poem.
Poet Alex Munoz (real name: Butch Espere), who is definitely a "brother in the faith" responded with a moving poem which he called Resolution No. 1 (Reply to HIS HOUSE WAS RAIDED BY THE ARMY). After reading it, I felt my soul soften like I was a cloud floating in the atmosphere. Apparently, Alex found my poem depressing (There is that word again!) and it may have driven him to anger. And as he said to me in Facebook, "After reading your poem last night, I wished I could talk to those people and tell them, FIGHT BACK. RECLAIM YOUR LIVES! I guess that was all to it. Because I can't, I tried writing the poem." Whew! Here is a guy who carries the weight of the world on his shoulders. In his poem he says, "This war is not about razing or dying. It's about seizing the higher ground." These lines make my hair stand on end.
The two poems together elicited an impassioned discussion on rights abuse. Fifty (50) comments were generated in less than 48 hours. I uploaded the comments in the Comments Section here and urge readers to pay attention to them as well. I forwarded the poems to the (Northeast) Indian and to other Indian friends because I know they could share our thoughts with their people. Besides, as Alex/Butch said, the poems were written with them in mind.
I posted the poems on my Multiply site, and they were published by Bulatlat but they also deserve a space in this blogsite. It opened in May 2007 as a poetry site until my opinionated self could not resist writing a line or two- OK, long paragraphs at times- about issues. So once again, let us shift to poetry.
His House Was Raided By The Army
Firm he stood on the quaking ground of justice And obliged the cracked lips of mendacity To declare the truth grappling to surface From the prison of hollow, specious rhetoric
Then his house was raided by the army
He halted the arms of death before they fired At his hapless people who could no longer tell The face of Life from Death, Hope from Trepidation A flash of light from his nerve unsettled Darkness
Then his house was raided by the army
He marshaled the strength of weeping women Their virtues slain in the altar of madness and terror Carefully, he covered their painful nakedness With promises of hope he sometimes disbelieved
Then his house was raided by the army
Will his tired people adjourn from digging graves, Or waiting in vain for the ghosts of the disappeared? When will the torrent of fresh blood dry on the roads Paved by courage, blasted by terror, entrenching doom?
While he meanders between despair and hope
Another house will be raided by the army. (12 Nov 08)
Resolution No. 1 (A Reply to HIS HOUSE WAS RAIDED BY THE ARMY) by ALEX MUNOZ
The winged wind had just whispered to the trees the invaders are here. But do not scamper, my dear Melinda. Hush, the owl would soon sound the clarion call. See the sky turn pitch ebony to blind our foes, the vines sway
to seal the glades. This is our forest, their trap; their Styx, our Ellysian Fields; the "masa" our gods to keep us immortal. So be damned no more by false analogies. Worry not about death or kindred cares. For this war is not about razing or dying.
It's about seizing the higher ground. Take these arms as your pillow when you lay-spread on the rathole. Hold them close to your bosom to banish the demons lurking beyond our trenches. Recast them into harpsichord
for new lays for old minstrels, to make lovers of us all. Kiss the gasera flames goodbye, tiger roll to the wooded knoll. Now, there beneath the evening star let us discard our right to remain silent as we, doomed to take the prize, squeeze the stone in their hearts. (20 Nov 2008)
