This song has no title no artist no album no genre unless you consider every person who had ever whispered this song from cracked lips and dried up throats or had hummed its tune in monotonous habit until it became nothing but a humdrum sing-a-long, pass-it-on religious routine with each letter sounding outlandishly familiar to something forever etched in their memory.
My mother taught me this song when I was two years old because a decade minus eight is the age where you start remembering things like the shape of your mouth when you’re forming the letter O how it’s supposed to feel when it’s been struck and how you’re supposed to not fight back how you’re supposed to accept that you’re the weak one how you’re just supposed to always and forever just sing this one song.
“This is the song your father and his father and his father’s father and all their grandfathers’ great grandfathers sang. This is the song that began our end,” is what my mother told me before she taught me and before her lips could form the first vowel before her throat could carry the first syllable I knew.
I knew that this song was a fallen hymn drenched in desperation its words only there to fill in the deafening silence and like cheap cement only meant to repair but not to mend. A tune that would put you to sleep in order for you not to notice the truth swept up under the rug A ballad of blood and ash enough to fill up your lungs and flow through your veins until its lies crawled up, tainted and tattooed your skin to produce scars for the world to see scars for the world to label me and say, “Ah. She is her mother’s daughter.”
And when my mother finally sang the song, I could feel the deceit and betrayal electrifying the air adding to the illusion this twisted symphony created that this is the only song we can sing this is the only song we were meant to bring with us from cradle to grave. I could hear hatred notes of ignorance chords of discord something was wrong with the harmony and I cried, “Change the song!” My mother sang on. “Change the song!” My father started to blend. “Change the song!” My grandmother came as a third voice. “Change the song!” My grandfather started to tap his feet to the beat.
And I realized that more than three hundred and thirty three years ago someone had hummed a fa had pressed a piano key had written one verse had been forced to scream out the bridge with chains on their wrists crevices on their faces left by the tears that ran down the same path enough times to make riverbeds had passed the song down to his daughter and her daughter and her daughter’s great granddaughters and had never stopped writing the lyrics since
There was an awkward rest in the song as if someone had dared to stop continuing had put the pen down had tried to write truth instead of lies but had died with the song of insurgency and I asked my father whose blood it was and he answered, “Someone who asked questions.” So I asked him who I was and he answered, “Nobody.”
But here I stand here you stand knowing the truth that has resurfaced after being smothered by greed and power century after century curse after curse thorn after thorn I grew up asking questions and I’m asking them again. Are you going to be the first one to erase the words? Are you going to be the first one to drown them out with freedom shouts? Are you going to be the first one to lay the pen down? Because if you won’t, then I will so that one day, my daughters will know and carry this in their hearts, Angmamataynangdahilsa *iyo
A spoken word poem written for my school's spoken word competition finals. The question was, "What can Filipino Christians do to make an impact on this nation?"
The last line of this poem is the last line of the Philippine National Anthem, Lupang Hinirang.