Musings in Molobolo

by Maria Eleanor E. Valeros, #newmedia specialist

TUBURAN, CEBU, PHILIPPINES — Poetry is oppressive.

Even when the initial desire was just to check how much freshwater there is in Molobolo that meets immense Tanon Strait, I could still hear a parade of verses waiting to be born!

What did Eve Merriam say about poems? It doesn’t always have to rhyme, but there’s the repeat of a beat, somewhere.

I hear it in the gushing of flowing water. Oh, good Lord! There’s too much water wanting to leap out to sea. Something you will never learn where it has come from and where it will be going next – from brimming rivers to cascading falls to shimmering oceans.

I was with Sagarmathaji Rain, my only child, at the wash area of Molobolo Spring Park in Tuburan weeks ago. I love the beat and grind of country life here, attuned to the symphony of laundry clubs (palo-palo). The motivation was to immerse again in the laidback-ness of Cebu countryside, to dip in revivifying waters. No hurry. To watch my son enjoy the rush of too much water, to admire his skin wrinkle in the cold, and hear his teeth chatter to the point of surrender. But he instead refused his meals, wanting the whole afternoon to wade in, defy the current.

Poetry is onerous.

It aches even when the heart had already resigned from the desire to pursue; even when the hands had long given up. I could have written about how fast time flew, how swift my boy has grown, how wonderful it is to embrace back the wind. But I never did.

I will never know irony. The word befuddles me. I thought, all the while, that when you’re in pain, it is easier to weave conflict into poems. That you have a deep inkwell to draw inspiration from when you come face to face with the incongruity of what is expected and what actually transpires. But I never saw my pain in there the way it would wave its crinkled hands before me while here dabbling with assignments in my mobile workstation.

Poems must have that inner chime that makes you want to tap your feet or swerve in a curve.

I heard a childish shriek from my boy in his failed attempts at scooping fallen leaves swept away by the current. More than tapping my feet or taking a bend, I would want to swim in his laughter. It was devoid of pretense, misery. The whole world was his at that time that I hardly can share with. It was just a moment for me. Something that I will never get a hold of in perpetuity. As soon as the day is over I would be back to cursing the world that so “fearfully and wonderfully shaped me.”

There’s a lilt, a leap, a lightning-split. Thunderstruck, the consonants jut, while the vowels open wide as waves in the noon-blue sea.

Oh good Lord, what is irony? It is supposed substance poems are made of. Its absence likens a poet to a proud blogger sans a reader.

You hear with your heels, your eyes feel what they’ve never touched before. Does that mean I should see fins always on a bird? Or how about feathers on a deer? Maybe, poems are made for us to taste all colors, inhale memory and tomorrow, the tang of today.

Molobolo: your whimpers grate on my nerves all the more that conviction never to justify in poems what’s unsuitable, disagreeing and inappropriate. Maybe, there’s much water too gurgling in my head drowning sensibilities.

I will never come to terms with how the literati have always wanted poetry to be defined. I am drowned, as always, by the proud and the loud.###

Memories of ‘my Shire’

by Maria Eleanor E. Valeros, #newmedia specialist

SURIGAO DEL NORTE, NORTH MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES — While munching on my share of “tinanok nga kamote” (boiled sweet potato), I stared out at the dimness of the early evening.

In the enveloping blanket of night I sought some kind of comfort. My stay in Gigaquit town (pronounced hee-ga-kit from the term “gakit”), nineteen years ago, was the most beautiful chapter of my life as a child. (*Gakit means raft)

Our ancestral house was surrounded by a vast green field, very much like a carpet covering the chocolate brown earth with verdant rice stalks sprouting from a mud-logged bosom.

A milky, buttery, soft scent, that only nature’s perfumery can mix perfectly, emanates from the ripe amber rice grains (palay) hanging from their drooping stalks. As soon as I smelled that familiar scent again, I knew that harvest time is just around the corner.

“Have some supas (poor man’s cookies),” my stepgrandma’s voice snatched me away from reverie. Cold orange juice was served after each one of us had our share of the cookies.

I turned away from the sight of that pitch darkness and listened to elder men and women play the juego de anillo which I learned back in the graders. It is a game of wits played during a bilar (wake) which resembled the poetic exchanges of a Balagtasan.

Some men were chatting about the sudden death of my tatay (to mean my grandfather), some were playing the bakarat (a card game), while others were preoccupied with the passing around of the glass filled with pinonsihan (a mix of lambanog or wine from nipa sap, and Pepsi) which most folks here preferably call tinam-isan.

“Bayong na man kaw, ‘po! (You’re already drunk, grandpa!)” a hoarse voice of a little boy addressing his popo (grandfather) chimed.

“Mukadto na kita kuman, ‘po! (Let’s now go [home]!)” the boy urged.

The youngster brought back memories of my popo giving me a tongue lashing every time I talk back to him, the mischiefs of a child.

“Maldita ‘kaw na bata ‘kaw. Dapadjon ‘kaw nan ina mo (You wicked girl. Sure your mother will give you a spanking),” he once spat.

Which I had answered back calmly: “Sige, sumbong sad tika nanay (the way we call grandma) ba. Gikawat nimo itlog sa pugaran (Okay, I’ll tell nanay then you stole eggs off the nest).”

But it’s all over now. What remains is an overwhelming silence of the heart. Everything seems to stand still. As still as a photograph; details frozen forever within the frame’s borders.

I was back in Gigaquit only to be shrouded by some blanket of melancholy.

Mother is completely an orphan now. She has not had the privilege to bond well with her father who refused to send her to secondary school – despite her very good grades. In fact, mother graduated on top of her elementary class. High schools then were studied in the urban areas, the big city only. So her father made the distance a ginormous excuse. Mother resented that decision badly that she sought work in Manila without getting parental permission. Of course mother felt so much remorse, she would retell, having given her mother great pain. But she too has a strong statement to point out!

Time, of course, can heal most familial differences, but mother – the spiteful that she is, albeit compassionate and considerate in her own little way – contained in her heart an ill feeling against her father. Until a viral infection claimed my grandfather’s life.

“This used to be my playground//This used to be my childhood dream//This used to be the place I ran to…why did it have to go…?” a Madonna song popped up in my mind. Yeah, this used to be family ground. Roots ground. And then there’s a phenomenon called ‘death.’

Mother and grandfather have not really talked in ages.#