To speak of the celebrated Tagbilaran/Dumaguete poet Marjorie Evasco is to speak of a life devoted to poetry, to teaching, to the difficult but necessary labor of giving voice to what has long been silenced. Born in the quiet coastal town of Maribojoc, Bohol, Evasco—known to friends as Marj—grew up steeped in the cadences of both English and Binisaya. It is this dual inheritance that would shape her lifelong work of weaving language into both bridge and mirror.

Her journey began in the classrooms of Catholic schools and later at Divine Word College in Tagbilaran, where she earned her degree in English in 1973. She first worked in the Ministry of Public Information, writing features and eventually becoming editor, before leaving government for the more enduring vocation of literature. At Silliman University, where she earned her MA in creative writing in 1982, she found her footing among peers and mentors. Soon after, she began her long tenure at De La Salle University, rising to professor emeritus, where she trained generations of writers—including her annual stint as regular panelist for the Silliman University National Writers Workshop.

Her oeuvre is remarkable in both breadth and depth: Dreamweavers (1987), Ochre Tones (1999), Skin of Water (2009), and Fishes of Light/Peces de Luz: Tanrenga in Two Tongues (2013, with Venezuelan poet Alex Fleites)—all later included in her omnibus collection, It is Time to Come Home: New and Collected Poems (2023). Her work has traveled across languages and continents, finding place in anthologies from Manila to London, from Havana to Singapore. The awards have been many—the National Book Awards, the Palanca, the Free Press, the Balagtas Prize, the S.E.A. Write Award—but these are only emblems of a deeper truth: Evasco has always written with integrity, whether in the lyric hush of a farewell poem or in the luminous dialogues she curated in Six Women Poets.

She has been, for Philippine letters, both witness and weaver. Also a sometime poet of goodbyes, farewells, and departures—especially in poems like “Despedida,” “Elegy #1,” “Mama’s Death Anniversary,” and “Poet in Exile”—but also of returns or hints of return, such as in “September Fugue” and “Why I Keep Coming Back,” and most especially, “It is Time to Come Home,” the poem that gives her latest collection its title. In these poems, I find Evasco at her most devastating: tender, lyrical, and unsparing.

But my favorite of all is “Ritual for Leaving,” because it is also the most Dumaguete of all her poems—written on the occasion of two poet friends, Grace Monte de Ramos and Juaniyo Arcellana, bidding their farewell to [an unnamed] Dumaguete:

Ritual for Leaving

For Grace and Juaniyo

Go now, and go at noon 
When this city shall stand 
Intense in the light, 
Equal to your silent grief. 

There are many ways of taking leave: 
Even when we choose to be dumb 
Our bodies, hands, feet, senses, 
Motion their own speeches as we go numb 
Gathering things to pack from room to room 
Or weaving the streets and boulevard 
After the usual beer at sundown. 

It is easier to leave 
In the middle of day—
The view from the port, postcard-pretty, 
Accented by kitchen smoke 
And blooming acacia trees—
An ordinary scene on an October day 
Which will probably be the same 
When you come back: a strange assurance 
Of infinities or that something 
We call indestructible.

The poem renders departure as both ache and ordinariness. It opens with stark instruction—“Go now, and go at noon”—invoking light as witness to grief. It acknowledges the many, embodied languages of farewell: the numb hands, the weaving through streets, the rituals of beer and packing. Yet Evasco resists despair. By situating leave-taking against the backdrop of acacia trees, kitchen smoke, and postcard ports, she transforms the pain of separation into an almost consoling rhythm of continuity. The poem, finally, suggests that even in absence, the world endures, offering us the fragile assurance of return.

In the Filipino imagination, farewells are always freighted with distance. We are a people defined by departures—seafarers, migrant workers, lovers bound to leave, friends who slip away into exile. Evasco gives us a vocabulary for this grief that is tender rather than bitter, a language of leavetaking that honors the gift of having loved at all. Her metaphors—birds in flight, water slipping away, dreams that persist—are not decorative but elemental, the very grammar of our diasporic condition.

Perhaps this is why her farewell poems haunt me. They remind me that to live is to leave, over and over again. Every embrace is a prelude to parting. And yet, what remains after reading Evasco is not sorrow but light—the small flame of a candle left in the window, illuminating the memory of presence, the possibility of return. In her poetry, goodbye is not an ending but a tender promise that what has been shared will not vanish.