Some poets reimagine the past & others are dead.
In our national dance my people become birds,
made to jump between bamboo traps.
According to dubious sources, Spanish landlords once
clapped sticks against my people’s feet, hence the hopping.
I am told this is a narrative of resilience.
My mother grows up by the oil depot, spends girlhood
breathing petroleum. Jumps between wood planks
across the toxic river until she wins her own blue
passport. I am told this is a narrative of resilience.
What pain we shroud in metaphor. What pasts we make beloved.
The dictator’s son is sworn in wearing barong tagalog. Guerrillas
train in Nikes dumped from trash bins of the first world.
*
Is propaganda a dirty word?
Are we so afraid of mirrors?
In 1965, Chinese sculptors depict a peasant
rebellion. Elderly clay men lug rice to their clay
landlord.
Clay prisons confine clay debtors.
Clay bullets & axes & fists
remembered by flesh & honored with sweat.
Today, an exhibit in the CIA-funded museum
which Marcos visits on his first U.S. trip.
Talks resilience.
Today, the price of onions. Today, the task
of writing feudalism in present tense.
I admit I am a product of my class.
Too easy some nights dreaming utopia.
Searching jasmine flowers for meaning,
deboning language, abstracting war.
Some poets reimagine the past & others hold a
gun. How to demand nothing encased in amber.
How to carry the hammer
& use it.
*
Clarita Roja says we write poetry
in the face of class murder. Mao asks
us for whom?
Before his killing, the martyr sang
of nationalized steel mills: labor
returned to the people, workers
returned to humanity.
Many things we can’t yet imagine,
but some of them we can:
to kiss the wounds, to un-wound
the children, to children belief,
to re-belief democracy,
to democratize the zinc mines
the mountain the hasyenda the riverbed. Why else die a martyr’s
death.
Why else wish to be planted.
*
Poetry in the face of class murder,
poetry as the sun’s humble reflection,
poetry as necessary abstraction
for concrete analysis.
Who genuflects my name
Who sets bamboo traps at our feet
Who builds the oil depot
Who makes holy the passport
Who sells seeds to the peasant four times the price
Who glorifies amber
Who murders the poet
Who murders the poet
Whose class?
Civil war in its most literal sense.
Did you know? & did I?
On my best days I remember to be dialectical
I undress myself before history
I enter the chorus of horizoned laughter
I commit to the time of monsters, apocalypse birth
I lucid my hands with the responsibility of clay
Make sickle my tongue
Make hammer my language,
make concrete the hammer,
our people the concrete.
Note: This piece draws inspiration from J. Moufawad-Paul, the Rent Collection Courtyard, Mila D. Aguilar, Mao Zedong, Ericson Acosta, Chad Booc, V.I. Lenin, K. Murali, and countless others.
