THE UNFINISHED HOUSE BY THE SEA

They are converging
to the center they are gathering,
kindred souls to the Persian dictator
who denied the Holocaust--
the gassing of a million Jews--
and in like manner the incineration
of memories by the sea.

They are paying
obeisance, they would not see
the stains that wrap them, they who lap
every word they spew 

from mouths full of vermin.

The literary ayatollahs are rejoicing,
The enemy is dead, we are kings!

Several towns away, to the south of them,
the exposed iron bars,
electrical wires
rough cement walls
rue in the wind, and many a night
the patta speaks of loneliness.

Yet the wrinkled widow still remembers
when she and her beloved Godofredo
hosted them year after year.
She of the faded beauty, wails and laments:
what a waste, what rottenness!


patta: Ilokano for the basic structure of a house

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS OF EDSA GONE?

Revised version/All rights reserved




They were respectful
officers and gentlemen, honorable, may be noble,
like the assassins who coveted the throne
of Rome.

The truth-keeper, in white uniform,
told an inquisitor: they dipped their fingers
in the people's cookie jar.


Shall we accept these lies?
As in the tyranny of plea bargains?
Shall we compromise?

Lapdogs, no more than the invaders
who bayoneted our children
in that war of horror and shame.

Shall we raise our collective voices and,
like the people of Jericho,
bring down
this wall
this prison
that has killed our dignity, our creativity, our initiative--
this morass that has shut us
in a million islands of despair and hopelessness,
us and flagellants who subsist on $1.00 a day,
us who eat only once under the sun?

(Memory, bury our children who died
 of worms and garbage bread.)


O, masochist bearers of the cross!
Shall we lay in ashes, who have become jaded since
the fall of Ferdinand ?

Shall we forever let them pick for us and receive in silence
the crumbs of their perfidy?

Where, O, where have all the flowers of Edsa gone?