Edgar B. Maranan
Ingalú, for Mt. Pinatubo
Little more than the dome and belfry of the church of San Guillermo
remains...its handful of parishioners now enter through the window of the
choir loft for services.
1
A blue madonna weeps in waist-deep ash.
It is heaven slams all mercy’s windows shut
on San Guillermo’s blinded saints.
The bells are choked, the dulled pews heavy
with the sulfur of men’s sins, the brimstone of fate.
There is no remembered time, immersed
in sludge beyond man’s measure.
There is not even the memory of birdsong
expunged by searing air, warped wind drawn
like a last breath into the lungs of hell.
2
Veil of dust lace blows on once was road or field,
while rills of mud explore the last of a dying reed.
Where the gray shroud swirls, horde of palms appears,
then mummy eyes, their human shadows in procession,
a passion play of bellies propped on hips and limbs.
Behold, yet suffer them at their approach, their plaintive
chorus for some alms an obstacle to our journeys
through ground zero, where these ash-cursed children
have been orphaned from the native land.
3
Iris in splendor, the molten sunsets glow
in a distant land or continent, the globe cools
a good degree, and life goes on like rarest grace.
The gods of twilight dance on dazzling beach,
a painter gouaches over in magenta trance
a couple revels in the purple drapes of dusk
where tragedy comes rare, in another planet.
In mourning our passage, we exult in the colors
of death, we find drama in the tumult of earth,
knowledge grows as all life is diminished.
4
What beauty, terror, twinned in God’s own bowels,
disgorged into this basic world of ire and dust,
adrift in accidental void, lahar’s theology?
Mere molecules, we live amidst the veins of fire,
the arteries of primal elements more fearsome
than our puny evil, for though we will the death
of millions, our sudden end through purest whimsy
—the geometry and schedule of the girding vents—
is part of some celestial joke, the word-made-flesh,
the flesh-turned-dust, the biped majesty, the Godhood
rendered into ash, and cindered attitudes.
5
In Aeta myth, the beginning was landless ocean,
until Manaul lures the skyworld fling the rocks
to form the world, and thence the trees, the grass,
the birds, the quadrupeds, all beings that would serve
Namalyari’s gentle people, kinky-haired and wise
as all those sprung from native earth.
6
Pinatubo nights: the tremolo of bamboo music,
the resonance of gong, the keening of violin,
the hungering strum of tube guitar and harp,
the chanted poetry of earthlife, love and death,
but only ingalú remains, lament of utter sadness,
a burying of time, lives lived, and dreams long gone.
7
Under a bridge in Balintawak, there grows a tribe
of scabrous rabble, shorn of bamboo, beads, and names,
whose skin of sores thickens with the city’s grime.
North, their mountain homeland lies, its peak
about to heave a plague of dust upon the plains
having lent to the skies of God’s special world
the loveliest sunsets in the universe.
9
Where is the land
where we can rest
after all these wandering years
The metal birds have ruled our valleys
the straight-haired our forest world
Our cradles have flowed
down to the rivers
our bones are wedged
among the rocks
Where is the land
where we can rest
after all these wandering years
(from Passage: Poems 1983-2006, Bookmark 2007)
PHOTOS: top, by Parc Cruz; left, from Siliconium.Net
