The Yellows are Yellower

(For those who took part in the yellow revolution)



It is a spectrum, this play of shades

And nuances like those that we say

With an idiom of idiocy and ignorance,

The same ones we use to camouflage



The other colors of our common sorrows

We who live by the moment and by the day

By the gifts of misery laid out before us

By the tender mercies of mass murdering



Compatriots and comrades in this hard life

And death, they who speak of yellow revolts

As if these were actions pure and pristine,

Immaculate in their claims to tentative truths



And generosity of heart even as they

Log the forest of our reason, they

Who owe us so much in terms of the languor

Of love, the small man's sacrifice of dreams,



Wasting them for nothing, for no-thing,

To beg for the big man's greater glory

In this our land as in other lands,

In this terror of a thousand risk-takings



In mountains cleared or savaged or raped

By machine and man, by vacuous intentions

And by that sense of purpose in pesos

For that search for yellows yellower



Than the ones we have around as ribbons

Tied to trees and in the barrels of guns

Or in coctail dresses for widows and sons,

They who have to keep on kneeling some more



Make penance for the dirt that gets into doors

Or the steps of prayer parlors for adorers,

Those who wait for the wind to calm down

Those who calm the wind with their candles



And incense sticks they burn with yellow lights,

The fire glowing as well in yellow to capture

The yellow sights, sounds, smells, these yellows

Of the procession that was to transform as well,



The yellows that dismissed the lifetime dictator

With his yellowed mind, with his yellowed soul,

Yellow heart and yellow mysteries, he who loved

The one who was offered in the yellow of an altar.





Aurelio S. Agcaoili

Dec. 2004





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