"Cuernos de Negros"

By Elsa Victoria Martinez -Coscolluela

The gentle rustle of mountain spirits
Unspool memory as the lamplight leaps
Into a sudden dance: once a child
He had watched his father clearing grass
Grown wild; he had sought and staked
His kinship with the sower's stance
And drove the plough with his bare hands.

Up in the sky he had scanned the slopes
Of his father's mountains: gently winding
Down, the river ran from the bubbling spring
And split and multiplied across the heaving
Fields so richly pied with fruits
And ferns and flowers; now scourged by dry
Winds whipped by the sun's thieving eye.

Midnight under the cold white moon
And dim, dying stars, he returns and wonders
Still at the curious call of dark birds,
The plop of frogs on a quiet pond, cicadas
Crying about the trees, the swish of scythes
At harvest time, and the boy that ran
Singing down the winding mountain slopes.

At dawn, through the clearing fog, steel
Structures rise close to the sky, dig
Deep between the mountain's horns, suck
From its stones its majestic core of power.
In time, the springs will die, and all
Will genuflect before the powerful spires.

In time they will not remember, but perhaps
When they grow old, they will see visions
Of Cuernos de Negros in their dreams.

(1975)


Source:
A Habit of Shores, ed. Gemino H. Abad, University of the Philippines Press, 1999.

DUMAGUETE CITY AND THE CUERNOS ~ Here's a glimpse of the City of Dumaguete and the Mountain ranges of Cuernos de Negros. Photo courtesy by Alan Anthony Pescuela Kirit Jr.

                   

Kassandra and Other Heroines

 Katipunera and Other Poems by Elsie Victoria  Martinez- Coscolluela

(Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1998)

Kassandra and Other Heroines

The poems in this collection were written between 1965 and 1973, overlapping Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos' declaration of martial law in 1972 by only one year. Historians claim this period in Philippine history is the country's most prosperous. When Marcos declared martial law, all forms of expression were suppressed -- newspapers were shut down, publishing almost ground to a halt. Stories of writers, labor and student leaders disappearing have entered into the Philippines' history pages and mythology.

During that time, Elsa Martinez Coscolluela pursued graduate degrees in Siliman University and De La Salle University and tried her hand at playwriting. When she tookp up poetry again in 1993, she would create collections that would win awards -- Katipunera and Other Poems won first place in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, a national writing contest, in 1995. This collection along with new poems appeared in book form in 1998.

"Katipunera" reflects the prosperity shortly before martial law that the Philippines would have pursued had writers not been diverted from craft to survival. Coscolluela draws from the Philippines' relationship with China and Spain in telling about a recently-passed grandmother in "Camphor Chest":

The men say you always knew your place, standing
By Grandfather at every feast...
The women praise your tidy
Home, your upright sons...
Your honoring the head of your house.

(They do not speak of your absent daughter.)...

And though the hour is late, it's too early yet
To sort out all the tokens fixed and sealed
In you precious camphor chest...
Carefully crafted by your mother in China
When she sent you off across the sea....

And here, more precious than all these, a stack
Of letters from your daughter: frayed and stored
And ribboned, and now I know what I always
Thought I knew with inner knowing. As I unfold
The letters, one by one, the vague aching
Spaces in my heart are filled with love.

Though you could not send her off with woman--
Things in a camphor chest, I know she brought
With her your silent blessings, knowing
Perhaps all mothers know she had to break
Her vows to be. And so you set her free,
And secretly sent her off across the sea.