Somewhere in the darkest corners
Of a speck of land
Shadowed on a world map,
There is a girl who still believes in wonder.
She is childlike faith vacuum sealed
In pint-sized hope
A revolution craving to be lit up,
A breath of fresh air to anyone who has lived through dirt and pollution,
A livewire of well-kept new ideas.
She is a book.
A good one but a closed one.
A book that sits on the front shelves at bookstores
But nobody dared to read between her lines.
But other than the galaxies of impossibilities she has sketched up in her head,
She is nothing more than short of perfection,
Small
Flawed
Misunderstood
But
Her hopeful whispers needed a microphone.
She believes in the hustle and bustle of success in her little speck of land
Impossible, it may seem
as she IS a speck
in a sliver of land
in a country that is almost always forgotten by anyone who has browsed through a map,
Disregarded by other countries
Abandoned by its own people
But forget the size on a scale of the earth.
Little as she is,
to her, her speck of land is big enough
Big enough to fill with all the love a person is capable of.
Big enough to fill with hands that held each other tight enough to be called unity
Big enough to be filled with more confidence in the country
than pride in personality.
In fact, the word "big" is too little
To describe the way she sees things.
She believes in herself
But she also believes that she is small.
And insanely enough, she believes she can be both
That her individuality for a stand out country
Could not be limited by
A weak immune system
Or the amount of inches she grows in a year
Or the color of her hair.
Yes, when the world gets tough,
And when everything larger
Turns against her
Pressing her into a cage of painful pressure,
She helps herself
By sticking her hand out for the very people who make her weak.
Because courage turns into cowardice
If it is not used to stand up for others.
And though she is small,
That only means she could make her way through
The narrow roads
In a tricky path called life.
Bending when branches of trouble swept above her,
Crouching when the rain poured,
And slipping into deep spaces.
But more importantly,
Overpowering all her beliefs,
She believes in something higher,
In something much stronger than the strength of her imagination,
In something that could turn her plans into a reality,
And the best part of it all is that this "higher force"
Is a He
And He believes in her
Much more than she believes in Him.
She holds her plans for this country in a teapot,
But He is the One who pours it over us
Until this cup, this country, overflows.
She believes this country is ready.
And as for Him, well,
So does He.
But no matter how wondrous she makes the future of this country seem,
We are still everything she didn't say we would be.
So, scavenge your heart for the truth,
Dig around for treasure and hope,
Seek high and low for even the little shards of faith,
Because one day,
We might just find her
In you and in me.
"How can young Filipino Christians demonstrate leadership and contribute to nation building?"
This poem was my answer in the finals of my school's spoken word poetry competition.