Letter from Home

As for life in the backwoods,
Do not say I asked for it.
In my country, this is the way to live.
A stranger arrives wearing the face of a daughter
Gone over the world and returned to say,
All this is wrong and had to go.

Neither is this about failed experiments;
The communes are not textbook scraps
Children of revolutions may or may not pick,
This is about secret scratches on the brain:
The memory of plow wedged into earth;
Of milk squeezed out of a beast’s teats.

It’s not even about serving time or God;
Nor about being mad or sad
That poems may be written on rocks and tree barks;
This is about reaching for the bottom of things:
The rust of steel dug from a feet deep;
The smell of sepsis breaking out from beneath the hard crusts.

This is about finding one’s true roots;
Ripped wires that burn and bleed underneath;
The gift of coming back to the bombed place;
To bury the bones of the dead.

This is about life taken for its own sake;
The homing of a knife into the heart.


20 July 2008
Pagadian City