Mga kaisipang pinadaloy ng Obra ni Egai Talusan Fernandez
at kwento ng gitara ni Oscar Belleza, bilanggong pulitikal
Originally posted as a comment entry to San Anselmo Publications Weekend Poetry Challenge 10/3/2021
Translation:
Eulogy for a Slain Guitar and Prayer to An Ancestor Zither
(Thoughts Inspired by a Painting by Egai Talusan Fernandez and the Story of the Guitar of Oscar Belleza, a political detainee/labor leader)
The painted canvas is an open window.
I see a bright landscape, a vision -
there, still alive
flying high, three kites of a thousand Pepes
and Pilars, reciting the native alphabet
of a forgotten history. Behind the inviting
green rice fields, where the musician seems
to offer an old repeating serenade,
a memory being concealed, squeezes through –
the bitter end of a musical comrade,
in a time that is now, just a while ago, it seems.
In the corner of a stump of a fallen tree
there peeps – one very sad story
The guitar of a labor leader, behind bars, unfree:
Violent indeed
was the end of that dear instrument.
Accused of concealing drugs in a sachet.
And with the faint rustle from the inside
of its wooden chest, they crushed
all the mem’ries it had sacredly kept.
Eleven years, it had been the bedmate,
a comrade in the struggle to have a decent sleep.
In an instant, its fate more dreadful than beaten.
The musician’s hugged box extrajudicially killed
by the guards. The tightened strings that blended
with the chorus, now broken by harsh social realities
and wrongful judgment. This is a belated eulogy –
the people, the masses, are eternally indebted in gratitude.
I now fervently pray to that zither in the portrait,
like our free ancestor. That the poems, songs, the chirps
of indigenous birds alongside the loud debating cicadas
and frogs in the rivers and in tree canopies may forever live.
Our Nature is a community tattooed with its own oneness
and may it stay alive like the woven tinalak wrap in the fields.
The buds shooting out of the buttresses of fallen lauan trees
whisper a promise. The ancient time and today are on a date –
a covenant of a new sound – carved in the baybayin script,
The future lies there, our people are not asleep.
Come and even if the cruel system cuts our singing strings
And imprisons the red-plumed bird that sings
They can never block even for a minute
As endlessly we’ll sing and chant our verses and beat
Until the Freedom we want is reached.