Fall

                              Simon Anton Diego Galera Baena
 

Footnote to a Sunday Psalm

 

 I know you made the growth, lord, from 

which we weave these sheets

 to make our beds, and the petalry which we

 crush and  let alone to bleed, to trap

 perfume, yes and the oak and shore

 and most good things, and even perhaps

 our meeting there last monday in the 

wind, and the dirty book i caught her

 with. did you make the cats she owns? 

one of them bites, you know, and i 

felt like kicking it and I really did 

while she was out riding one of your

 horses. and i know you made her, made

 her with her dewy eyes and clasp and

 hair, made her as you wove satin and 

the shade. god, you are the greatest. 

had you added one last stroke, you 

would have had a sly and savage peer. 

 Sands & Coral 1966

David C. Martinez 1967 Co-editor David C. Martinez was born in Dumaguete City and earned his undergraduate degree from Foundation University.Teaching English ,Literature and Social Sciences in his alma Mater St. Paul University Dumaguete City. Soon after, he entered Silliman University law school, where he distinguished himself as a debater winning gold medals at national collegiate debate competitions. He also wrote poems, essays and short stories which were published in the Philippine Free Press and Weekly Graphic between 1964 to 1971. As a vocal political activist during the early years of Martial Law, he was briefly detained by the military and eventually resettled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in California USA, where his family has resided since 1974. He edited the Asian American News in Los Angeles in 1979. Martinez was a double winner in the 1997 Carlos Palanca Award for Literature (English Division) with his “The Amulet” garnering First Prize in the Short Story Category and “Shadow on the Sun” garnering Second Prize in the Poetry Category. His book A Country of Our Own: Partitioning the Philippines was published in 2002 by Daykeeper Press and in 2004 by Bisaya Books. 

BLOWN GLASS (after Steuben)

Through etchings on the glass, water-clear, 

Earthy Venus bursts on a bed of grass; 

Airy grass splits to blades of jade 

Under the fullness of her limber thighs. 

In her arms, a child of pulsing dehiscence,

 Cradles in the throbbing hollow of her breasts.

 Mother and child, of birthing burning clay, 

Fashioned by rapture’s rupture, inmost fire;

 Wakened by bathos and warm blood; 

Heat thawed their spatial rims and borrowed time, 

The span of silent voices, grass and earth, 

The dense reaches of their finite souls.

 From grains of sand, heaving with motion’s birth, 

To molten red, blown by some fervid breath,

 Blown full, blown quickly before the sweeping 

Dryness of obstructive winds; 

Fashioned in this etching on the glass, 

Caged in stillness, trapped from death.

 This puffed breath blares the living voice 

Of mortal deity, immortal artificer, 

Whose fragile fingers and breathing mouth 

Roused the fluid mass and clay, 

Snared the fleeting patterns of the eye, 

Touched and traced quick gestures into glass.

 Sands & Coral 1968

Elsa Victoria Martinez 1968 Co-editor  Sands & Coral 

Elsa Victoria Martinez is an award-winning poet, fictionist, and playwright from Dumaguete City her roots from Tanjay City. She finished her Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, and then her Master of Arts in Creative Writing from Silliman University, where she was also crowned as Miss Silliman in 1964. She went on to obtain her Ph.D. in Language and Literature from De La Salle University. She has received the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for her poetry, short story, drama, teleplay, and screenplays through the years resulting in being given its Hall of Fame distinction in 1999. She has also received awards from the Cultural Center of the Philippines and the Philippines Free Press. As a poet, she is the author of the collection Katipunara and Other Poems, published in 1998. Martinez-Coscoluella (her married name) also wrote the full-length play “In My Father’s House,” which was staged at the University of the Philippines and at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1988, and in Silliman University in 2013. In 1990, she received the Outstanding Artist in Literature Award from the Negros Occidental Centennial Commission and in 1996, she was named National Fellow for Drama by the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center. She became the Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod City in 1991. She co-founded and directed the annual Negros Summer Workshops for Artists and Writers in 1991, and the IYAS Creative Writing Workshop in 2000 in collaboration with Cirilo Bautista, Marjorie Evasco, and the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center of De La Salle University in Manila. Coscolluela is an Associate of the Silliman University Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center.

"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.

Lockdown

 

When the bad luck day came to be

The clouds with darkness cover the skies

It was a bad feeling that  day I cannot harvest my labor.

 

When the paper was not process

My world turn upside down

When nothing left in your wallet

Only angry and sorrow appear in you

 

I pray to God, he will bless me that day

A good friend leads her helping hand

Even her whole family was suffering

From a virus of imagination

 

The day full of a bad experience

 laying down in my body of negativity

I feel evil and savage heart

My naked soul and confuse heart bring me to wonder

Thinking of ending my life to end my agony

 

When a woman with a map in her face

Slow doing her job, and I can only think of bad things

I want to slap on her face a million times

 

I lost hope and take a day to day as a challenge

The lockdown made me so sad and lonely

I lost a man who knows me and cares for me

I will be missing  you eternally

Til we meet again in a perfect time 

Lockdown June 15,2021

Penn Tulabing Larena 

Tanjayanon legacy For Literature

Tanjayanon  legacy For Literature

Dumaguete-born, political activist,Literature icon and writer. Martinez was resettled with his family by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; has lived in Los Angeles, CA since July '74. He was the 1979 Editor, Asian American News (L.A.); awarded First Prize for "The Amulet", Short Story / Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature; and a 1997 Palanca Awardee, poetry, for "Shadow on the Sun".

He published poetry, short stories, and essays in Philippine Free Press and Weekly Graphic,1964-1971; was record holder, Silliman University, collegiate debate gold medals won against RP's top universities, Ateneo de Manila, San Carlos University, University of San Jose, and Divine Word University; Outstanding Alumnus (Literature), Foundation University, Philippines. Currently Secretary General, Alliance for Separate and Independent Nations, Negros and St. Paul University Pillar in Literature.

Atty .David "Danny" Cabello Martinez,JD,LLB