Introduction
Lyric Fire by The River and Beyond
by Pelagio A. Alcantara
The poet rages and sings of his millieu.
Peter La. Julian is a respectable poet who burns and chants with a message and plucks his sensitive chord by the side of a river where he grew up and discovered the early sparks of his poetic fire. By accident of birth, being a riverside poet has its added advantage by designa: the life and death of rivers is a symbolic struggle between man and his environment from which clash and clime, ebb and flow, the poet draws his material and themaic insights. But beyond the river of one's boyhood is also a range and variety of Julian's powerful voice. Journalist and fictionist, parent and friend, he too is a government functionary undimmed by the mist of bureaucratic routine. But whether or not the poems in this volume are sermons, elegies or lamentations, always the chief mourner's mood and manner in his own gentle way rues against the "stupidities" of men in the "midnoon of their separate lives."
At ease with his medium and message, PLJ packs his lines and communicates with the intensity and force of lyric fire.He succeeds most when he ruminates over the summer spell of Padsan River and its massive bridge that connects his sullen city and beyond mocking the puny speeches of a festive folk crawling underneath. But he arouses best when he pokes his journalistic nose for a smell of the gut issues with piercing wit, imagery and sarcasm. His metaphor drips. His irony laced with certain sadness over the "babylons of the world" and the "gods who walk on white feet" in "these isles of songs and poems." He scorns the burdens of the bureaucracy as a "wet morning" in the house of public men, cabals and conspirators, "dissecting omissions of the boss" and then looks outside for sun where "sleep is a a beautiful country under the coconut tree."
But no matter what his quarrels with world are and the images he mourns, be that of a Negros child, the fall of a shallow boss, pimps at Las Palmas, Sunday Catholics, foreign exploiters, Kabunian and his brown gods, lure of the hills, tawdry politics, dying rivers, ravaged forests, rape of the multinationals, poet's loss of meaning, dead relative, or the reign of the new centurions of change--Julian is a nationalist consistently aware of and unfazed by his "enemies within." And in his attempt to redress society, he never fails to blend the luminous line and the nibbling sense of frustration bursting at the seams of his controlled rage.
That is why a reading of PLJ poems singly, or in this volume, is no dull and dense moment. Inspired by a Frostian view of reality that is "deep, dark and lovely," his is a nagging excitement, visceral and cerebral, that salves the pain and gross of irreverence and ignorance, pitfalls of parochial poetry and the arrogance of the turbid mind which he tries to avoid with grace and humility. Like his poems in English, the Iluko versions are silent celebrations of clarity and eloquence, even elegance, that require a separate comment and study for a deeper appreciation.
Minor slips and flaws nothwithstanding, and the temptation to moralize, "Umayka Manen, Ganggannaet/Come Again, Stranger" is a welcome event and invitation to the beauty and dignity of the countryside caught in the canvass of the poet as well as an introductioin to the overdue appearance in book cover of a recognized master of his millieu and message both in the English and Iluko ambience. With this ceremonial book, PLJ has come and is here with an asterisk.
The rage must go on.
POEMS UNDER THE TITLE OF THE BOOK
Today Arrives the News About the Fall of Doloroso Dans
it's a wet morning, but a promise of sun
lingers on the glass panes.
the room is too small for these public men
dissecting omissions of the boss now gone
to nowhere to celebrate alone
his fall. (was it the absent magazine message
that triggered his disaster?)
we are like conspirators revising the plot
in some alleyways dark with hate and violence:
a, brutuses recreating caesar's gory death.
no matter, the joy is ours now and we shall jot
in our diaries this day of victory.
basil valdez on tape wails out a song
sans end. (requiem to a dead rat?) the waxed floor
is littered with crumpled papers and cigarette butts.
the rubbish can wait, sings the janitor baring a set
of tattered teeth as he joins n the banter and the laughter.
(ha-ha-ha, the fetters broken?)
indeed, the people's domain needs
cleansing cream, new manners, new ideas, new minds
that, in pursuit of the sun, shall burn the night with liquid
fire of gods and high ambitions: no mre ruins to tread
this midnoon of our separate lives: the swan song
has been sung and the recorder is broken forever.
(did he not know, did not the cabal that fed
him with parables of lies hear the funereal songs of gentle souls?)
the typewriters are silent, the whir
of electric fans lost in the cacophony of sounds. like cattle
loosed from a coral, we excite the air and our voices reveal kinship
with roman assassins. no matter: this joy is ours now. permit us
these stupidities for just this day for soon our ship
shall move again and blaring trumpets shall in distant shores
announce our arrival.
*prize-winning poem originally published in FOCUS magazine, Manila
Ethiopia in Negros But not Vice Versa
1.
Ethiopia is barren country
Rains fall once in a century
There food crops do not thrive
And the children, diseased and always hungry
Are stony silent.
Their sunken eyes plead
for mercy.
Ethiopia is a joyless world
for children.
2.
Negros is green country
Rains fall in torrents regularly
There food crops thrive well
But the children, diseased and always
Hungry, must work hard
For a plate of rice.
Their sunken eyes speak eloquently
Of the filthy rich in thier country.
Negros is a joyless world
For children.
Notes To Ben Castillo, My Nationalist Brother*
1.
The gods who walked
on white feet
are back in a foreign country.
2.
Back in their islands
the barbarians who raped your sister
are erecting towers
on borrowed blueprints.
3.
And the teachers of democracy
tired of progress and surplus goods
are mocking god in vietnam.
4.
And we?
We who tore the g-string
from the brown body?
5.
Of course, we are snoring
the sun hot
on our face.
5.
Ha-ha-ha!
let the holocaust come.
Sleep is a beautiful country
under the coconut tree.
*originally published in the Philippines Free Press
DUNGA-AW IV
Namin-adun nga inukagko ti pakasaritaan
Awan nasarakak nga arngi ti panagparti
kadagiti karayan ti dara
idiay zamboanga idiay cebu
kadagiti nasulinek a disso.
Uray ti panagbirok iti mangpalag-an koma
iti luksaw patneng a kinadangkok
agpatingga iti pannakaupay
umadu latta dagiti saludsod
ket agtalinaed dagiti sungbat
a ganggannaet kadagiti binnatog
bimmaba ti dusa? wenno lunod?
panagsagaba agingga a perngen
ti init iti labes dagiti gura
dagiti kinaagum, allilaw?
ay, adtoy nga uliten ti historia
daytoy ti rugi? daytoy ti tengnga?
daytoy kadin ti paggibusanna?
agtuloy latta a maitugkel
dagiti padeppa nga awan naganna.
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