Tag / poetry

by buglaswritersjournal

Panay kag Negros

Ni AUGURIO M. ABETO

Daw sa tinalikdan lamang nga Kahapon
Nga ang mga Panaynon nagpasimpalad
Kag sining baybay sila naghalapon
Diri sa Buglasan nagtalambipalad.

Kay sangsa panulok nila nian maladlad
Kutob sa Madyaas ini ang Kanlaon
Sila naghiliuyon nga magahalad
Bulak sang ila gugma kay Dlwang Leon!

Sa Mandu sang Diwa sang palhing’ Madyaas
Sa tuyo nga sila magpatambipalad
Sa Diwata sinang bukid nga mataas
Ang panyong palaran ila ginpaladlad.

Nga sa mga balod kag sa Kahanginan
Nanungsong dayon sa gahumlad nga dagat
Sa kuyos sang habagat kag sang amihan
Tubtob sa Buglasan sib ang nagdangat.

Kag nian sa Buglasan ni Datu Mamagtal
Kag sadtong maanyag nga diwata Panas
Ang Kabukiran ila nga ginpamungkal
Kag mga talunan ila ginpanglatas.

Kag sa madasig nga tikang sang inadlaw
Napasad ang madamong’ kabanhawanan
Ang mga kauswagan nagpanalawdaw
Sa baybay, sa bukid kag mga talunan.

Nag-alaging ribok kag mga inaway
Nga nagbilin sang bilidhon nga Maragtas
Sang maisog to nga mga taliaway
Nga sang Kalalat-an sila ang naglagtas.

Sa tigbatas nga mga anak nagikan
Dungog ta nga inapinan sa binangon
Kag yadtong bansagon nga nagkalapukan
Sa aton amo’ng nagbuhi kag nagbangon!

Banwang Toboso, Sipalay, kag Magallon
Hinubaan, nga mga bag-ong’ sinalad
Kag mga banwa nga anay mga talon
Sang kabuhi gindagaan kag hinalad.

Yadtong mga ulang nga sadto nagsugod
Sa mga payag nga nipa kag kawayan
Nanginsulondan sinang labing mahugod
Nga mga anak sa palangabudlay.

Sila ang mga kaliwat nga dungganon
Sadtong mga pinasad nga mga banwa:
Imol, kasarangan ukon manggaranon
Putli kag alangay sa pagpanghimanwa.

Yanang pinanubli nga gahom sa Diwa
Salama tanan kita nga ginbugayan
Tingog sang tigbatas—tingog man sang banwa
Kay sa isip laban man ang Kagamayan!

Ang hambal ni Nanay,—putling’ Hiligaynon
Sa Panay nabun-ag, sa Negros nagluntad,
Nangin-dinalayday kag mga ambahanon
Sadtong sakayanon keg sang manlulontad.

Naglapnag ang putong ni Datu Sumakwel
Nanday Paiburong kag Daru Bankaya
Sa Negros namukag daw bulak nga clavel
Kay ang HILIGAYNON dili gid malaya.

Ang Hiligaynon lumaron sing dayon
Sa dughan sang banwa, sa bukid kag baybay
Sang tanan nga Nanay nangintulalayon
Kag sang mga Tatay nanginbinalaybay.

Namukadkad dayon—Pulong Hiligaynon
Sa mga Ambahan kag sa binalaybay
Pugad sang kalulo, Sabak nga iluynon
Nga ginayauban sang Negros kag Panay!

Panay and Negros

It seems only yesterday
When the people of Panay ventured
To sail this sea and came
To Buglasan seeking union.

When they viewed before them
From the heights of Madyaas, Kanlaon,
They agreed to offer
The flower of their love to the god Laon.

On orders of the god of forbidden Madyaas
To seek union
With the goddess of tall Kanlaon,
They unfurled their lucky handkerchief.

With the waves and the winds,
They glided on the open sea,
And blown by the south wind and the north wind,
They eventually reached Buglasan.

In Buglasan, ruled by Datu Mamagtal
And the beautiful goddess Panas,
They cleared and cultivated the mountains
And penetrated the forests.

And with the swift passage of time,
Many towns sprang up,
Progress spread everywhere
In sea, mountain, and forest.

Discord and war came to pass
Which left in their wake the history
Of our breve warriors
Who faced up to misfortune.

The free men who were their sons bequeathed
Honor they had defended with the bolo,
And those heroes who fell
Gave us the strength to live and rise!

The towns of Toboso, Sipalay, and Magallon,
Hinobaan, the latest to be set up,
Towns which were once wild forest
Were given life-worthy offerings.

Those ancient first settlers
In huts of nipa and bamboo,
Became models most exemplary
To their sons in life’s hardships.

They are of a noble race,
The people of these towns:
Whether poor, middling, or rich,
All equal in their pure patriotism.

The power invested by Cod
Was given equally to us all
The voice of free men—the voice of the nation
The little people were in the majority.

The language of Nanay—noble Hiligaynon
Was born in Panay and brought to Negros,
It became prose and song
Of those early travelers and settlers.

The language of Datu Sumakwel spread,
The language of Paiburong and Datu Bankaya,
It blossomed in Negros like the clavel flower
Because Hiligaynon never will wither.

Hiligaynon instantly became part
Of the heart of land, mountain, and sea
For all the mothers it became song
And for the fathers, poetry.

It blossomed instantly—the language Hiligaynon
In songs and poetry,
Nest of gentleness, the maternal lap,
The language adored by Negros and Panay.

Augurio Maranon Abeto [1903-1977] was a poet and essayist in Hiligaynon during the Golden Age of Hiligaynon Literature, and is widely considered the "King of Hiligaynon Poetry." He was born in the town of Binalbagan in Negros Occidental, and received his law degree from the University of Sto. Tomas, becoming a member of the Philippine Bar in 1933. He was appointed assistant provincial fiscal, a position he held from 1933 to 1938. He was elected Municipal President [the town mayor at that time] of Binalbagan in 1939, and served until 1947. During World War II, he set up a Resistance Force Government in the mountains of Binalbagan, which lasted the whole three years of the Japanese Occupation. In 1949, he was elected congressman of the third district of Negros Occidental, and served one term, during which he co-authord several bills such as the Sugar Crop Sharing Law. He was responsible for the creation of the town of Magallon [which is now Moises Padilla]. He devoted himself to his law practice from 1954 to 1964, and was considered by many to be a formidable defense lawyer. Failing to win a seat in the Constitutional Convention in 1970, he ran for municipal councillor and won in the elections of 1971. He is the composer of the famed Visayan song, "Dalawidaw."
by buglaswritersjournal

At Camp Lookout

By MYRNA PEÑA-REYES

Fog haze, morning chill
chart our days:
linger under blankets,
breakfast at ten, then
ascend a weedy trail,
lift our faces to the sun,
the wind fancying our hair;
listen how the mountain sings:
bird calls, insects, wind
in the trees, billowing the grass,
the trickle of a hidden stream,
the sudden startle of wings!

Down in the sweltered plains
doll houses, offices, streets lost
in the toy towns with borders
blurred in the clustered trees;
bathtub boats streaking a silver sea,
curve of shoreline holding back
the deep; Siquijor, Sumilon, Cebu
breaking up its sparkle and sweep;
and at the airfield scarring the land
planes descending, taking off—
we’re here to escape them all.
How distant they all seem!

Late afternoon,
the monotone cricket song,
cicada wings shivering the air,
bats navigating the dusk.
Soon the firefly hour,
Night’s bright sentinels encamped in the sky.
Far below, the town lights blaze,
ship lights crawl their slow trails
across the blackened sea,
drop below the horizon,
fade, flicker, sink.

Drawn downward,
our thoughts turn home,
the lowlands closer than we think.

Myrna Peña-Reyes was born in Cagayan de Oro City, but her family moved to Dumaguete where she was educated at Silliman University from elementary through college, graduating with a BA in English. She went on to earn her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. While a resident of Eugene, Oregon where she lived with her late husband, the poet William T. Sweet, she was a winner of the Oregon Literary Fellowship grant for poetry in 2002. Presently retired in her hometown of Dumaguete, she continues her volunteer affiliation with Silliman University’s literature and creative writing program. Her poetry collections include The River Singing Stone (1994), Almost Home: Poems (2004), and Memory’s Mercy: New and Selected Poems (2014).
by buglaswritersjournal

To a Tree Near a Boulevard

By Anthony L. Tan

Greener of foliage, darker of bark,
Wider the spread of branches,
You were a struggling sapling
When first I sought refuge under your shade.

You’ve weathered tropical depressions
And the scudding rains of thunderstorms.
Battered by winds and seasonal typhoons,
You have not cracked like the seawall.

Other trees, not you, in secluded forests
Have fallen in the whirr of chainsaws.
The only signs of outrage are the ex-votos
Curved heart-shaped round your gnarled bole.

No longer needing your shade for my head,
Though my sore heart needs shelter from life-storms,
I have come with one foolish wish: Perchance,
Through sudden shower of pink-white blossoms

You would deign whisper to me
The mysteries of your charmed life.

Anthony L. Tan was born in Siasi, Sulu. He earned his BA English from the Ateneo de Zamboanga in 1968 and went on to Silliman University in Dumaguete City for both his MA Creative Writing (1975) and PhD. in British Literature (1982). For more than a decade he taught at the English Department of Silliman University and was a regular member of the panel of critics at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 1983, he joined the faculty of the English Department at MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology and became one of its chairpersons in 1984-85. Together with Jaime An Lim and Christine Godinez Ortega, he helped organize the first Iligan National Writers Workshop/Literature Teachers Conference in 1993. He retired from teaching in 2012. He has won a number of awards for his writings, among them the Focus Philippines award for poetry, the Palanca 1st prize for “Poems for Muddas” (1993) and another Palanca for the essay. His poems and stories have been published locally and abroad, more prominently in the prestigious Atlanta Review and Manoa, the literary journal at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of two books of poems titled The Badjao Cemetery and Other Poems (1985) and Poems for Muddas (1996).
by buglaswritersjournal

Casaroro Falls

By GÉMINO H. ABAD

Our instincts on holiday urged a walk
through the countryside, a brief jungle trek
as lightsome quest to fill a vacant hour.
No, we didn’t think that bruited marvel,
cliff’s fall of waters pouring from the sun!
was too far to walk or too hid to find—
we were no longer young, my wife and I,
and worried about our boys though they are
as sure-footed and spry as mountain goats.


Resting awhile in a wild little glade
throbbing with the noonday whirr of crickets,
we quenched our thirst with bottled sun-warmed Sprite.
With shouts as to dare the encroaching woods,
our boys leaped to the clearing’s sunlit edge
—the mountain received them without a sound!
I sprang after them, and gripped my wife’s hand
as the sun blanked her sight where her heart dropped,
Oh, where?—Our boys had found their hearts’ mountain!


But we who knew danger and kept her speech,
must track that sheer drop without syllable,
foot to crevice, hand to vine, butt to earth,
eyes yearning to see the roaring waters
of her text—in full flood, naked to view,
in the vast sounding wilderness around.


Ai, here is no time, and the sun hangs fire—
and we are lost, and cannot ever speak.
Our hearts cry fear in the desolate woods
fraught with accident, and cry, Where is God?
or His hand, if bush to grip free its root
or vine to cling to grow a row of thorns.
O, how far down our cliff yet? a rumor
of waters drifts up to taunt our hearing
as we hang from the crumbly slope and slide
our bodies down the trail that slips and twists
like a coil of gut through the tangled shrubs;
any loose rock may suddenly cry out
and rain down stones and earth at last to break
the stillness made the tangled forests wild
and the cliffs hang sheer.
Our bodies pressed so
to earth must sense the weird geometries
of breath and sweaty grip, postulating
in grime a sudden precipice to flesh.


Through the jumble of fern and thorny vine,
we glimpse a shimmer of stream far below,
tumble of rocks like rugged cuneiform
to the dead tumult of the mountain’s birth.
The falls sound everywhere her murmurous
thunder, but invisible, cascading
without alphabet through the heave of trees
and fall of vines; amid the surge and roar
of waters, the derelict boulders seem
to fill the tidal caverns of her sound.


Our boys wait a long time for us, laughing
wet and bold on the stream’s tilting boulders;
the waters swirl barbaric round their feet
and toss up glinting spindrifts of the sun.
They wave to us like spirits of the woods
and point to the falls proclaiming her name.


And we look
to see her descending nude from her cliff,
and shield our eyes from the dazzle and sheen,
utter tumult and panic of her name—
Casaroro! wild oceanic tongue
to the mountain’s cliffs of cool greeting dusk.
Our boys must know what haunts her troubled speech,
from innocence and wonder they suppose
half the world’s seas thundering down from God’s
open hands, but I—dimly, through the lush
stillness of forests sprouting wild from earth,
I sense how the earth will last long after
our boys have become men and forgotten
how once a mountain strode tall through their
speech.
And again I look—
a stark foreboding of our flesh’s tumble
shivers my faith, and plucks in strange despair
a fierce conjecture from God’s thundering plunge.
Was it death’s steep annihilating drop
invented our God? or tendril of hope
that in our own cliff’s fall to His wet sod
should sprout a deep abounding wilderness,
Casaroro around His streaming hands.

Gémino H. Abad is a poet, fictionist, and literary critic. He served several posts at the Unirversity of the Philippines, as Secretary of the University and the Board of Regents from 1977-1982, Vice President for Academic affairs in 1987-1990, and Director of Likhaan: the UP Creative Writing Center from 1995-1998. At present he is a University Professor Emeritus at the University of the Philippines. He received Italy’s Premio Feronia (in 2009 for his poetry, the first Filipino to have been so honored. He also represented the Philippines in the Third Mediterranea International Festival of Literature and the Arts in Rome in July 2006. He is known for his three-volume anthology of Filipino poetry in English from 1905 to the present, including Man of Earth (1989), A Native Clearing (1993), and A Habit of Shores (1999), and his six-volume anthology of Filipino short stories in English from 1956 to 2008. He also co-founded the Philippine Literary Arts Council (PLAC), and is a Regular Panelist at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 2012, he was proclaimed National Artist for Literature.