Under the broken streetlamp
a Loonpoem struggles to be born
In the ruins.
Her voice cried
As the earth cracked open
And Our Lady of Light came
Tumbling down.
The selfsame church the poet
Clovis had been proud of,
A decade before as we drank
In Tagbilaran, in the porch
Of his sister’s apartment with
A parakeet nearby. Come visit,
he said, our church is beautiful.
Months later he was dead
from ulcers and
treacherous rum.
So poor Clovis, neither his hero
Simeon Lugo conqueror of swamps,
Never saw the fall of Our Lady
Of Light into the dark,
Nor heard his townmates gnashing
Their teeth, wandering homeless
Under the broken streetlamps,
Themselves poems struggling to be born,
That day a giant Diablo,
Roused from sleep unlike the poet
In the town cemetery, carved out
A chunk of Chocolate Hills,
Forcing the tarsiers to shut their eyes,
And the bamboo flowers to bloom
Across the boatless Loboc river.
From Juniors Mahusay to San Ting
Katipunan, the fate of Bohol
Was etched on your beer-chilled
Palm, oh the Maryknollers walking by,
And the eyes of Jing Cagawan that
Lit up whenever the poets read
Their work, or how sir Alex Hufana
Made wife rhyme with knife
In his poetry class late in the evening
With only a couple of students,
And one of them sleeping.
It now seems far removed from
Loon, not Doctorow’s lake,
But the town of your boyhood
Laid to waste by a nameless tremor
On the day of the Muslim feast
Of sacrifice. Even the parakeet
Was weeping, if indeed it had survived,
All the years in a cage in Tagbilaran.
The night was young and me and the wife
Walked the few blocks to Julie’s
For some siopao asado with egg,
To take back to the ramshackle hostel,
Still reeking of beer, and the bittersweet
Of the pinasugba pulutan.
Off into the dark you drove on your
Yamaha, back to Loon, back to
Your child bride and your firstborn now
Himself a father, a decade later, your kids
All grown up, their father’s bones in cemetery
Sleeping the sleep of the just.
From Loon to Getafe
The sinkholes are dancing.
Relief goods find their way
Into the grip of the hungry and homeless
Even in Maribojoc, Jagna and Loay,
Antequera and Sagbayan
May the churches rise like a song
Of Spanish harlem, and wake
Simeon Lugo to do battle with
Duendes and higantes, deep
In the Chocolate Hills and river
Of bamboo flowers, let Maryo J
Make movies and Marjorie
Of Maribojoc write her poems
Of light for our lady, neither fish
Nor fowl can tell the story,
How our province was no longer past
or future, and the tarsiers
being tarsiers cannot help
but say grace, and watch
a cat cross the street in the headlights
it’s as if its paws were wheels
turning in the heartless, wordless night
of Bohol.
