Let us call
A spade a spade.
Not a hoe to unearth limbs.
Not a plough to bring back life.
Not a sickle to mete out a sentence.
Not a lamentation to dramatize our grief.
We are now
In this business
Of burying the living
Of kibbitzing as the hundred dead
Bury their own hundred dead.
And we laugh lustily
A hundred times.
Really lustily.
And with that derision
Of the luckier ones.
Because the spade
Is not sharp enough
To understand the secrets
Of graveyard pits
And sullen soil for corrupting corpses.
Because the spade
Acts as if it were
The heart of
The mysteries of light
In these fields now
Turned to the ashes of ashes.
Because the spade
Cannot say sweet murmurs
To the mud now the vessel
Of sinews and muscles,
Tendons and ligaments
Of those who had always,
Always wanted to live.
It is a catastrophe,
One big man says,
His words elegant,
Powerful and piercing,
Like the unrelenting rains
That devastated
The tea-colored rivers
That wrecked humble homes
And bountiful harvests.
Nature-made, he says,
His wicked wisdom away
From this mourning earth,
His gentle smile,
Sweet and innocent,
From some abysmal places
Politicos and big liars
Know, rehearse for effect.
Nature-endowed, he adds.
And we must accept.
It is the universe's
Speech, its act
Of revenge against us
Sinners and non-believers.
But an angry man's ghost
Says: It is as well
A comedy meeting
Pathos, this, this catastrophe
That has no last name
But only fanciful codes
For convenience
Like this fake
Mayoral concern of
This forest-raping
Son of a bastard bitch.
Aurelio S. Agcaoili
Dec. 13, 2004
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