This Complete Catastrophe As Comedy Meeting Pathos

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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