On watching 'Small Voices'

It is one of those days.

The watching gets into you:
the film is reminder of all that is
in a teacher leaving for other places,
the pretext the dream
the context the future
the subtext the past
the paratext all that which will come to pass.

So with your film students,
you sit down to count the credits unrolling
and the poverty in a spectacle,
mothers never knowing what nurturing is
except to open their legs to the thieving semen
of absent lovers hungry for more lusting
but never for the suave loving
of the soft moonlight for the barrio night.

There, the rain is a hard lover
brutal as brutal can be,
the dust getting into the nostrils of murdered fathers
and those who fight the darkness
getting into the lowly corners of thatched huts
while those in fatigue and fanatic belief
in the democracy of all-time robbers
in cities and conclaves of the elect
the fated villages, for instance, no, not this last bastion
of small-town misery and dreaming on
they complete the ceremony for the salvaging
of a people's dream, them who seek the ways
of old, the ways of rivers seeking the ways of rainwater
from uphill down the valleys and plains
and in the west of lives lost
seals its perpetual fate with the seas.

You cry one more time
in your corner of the room, darkened to filter
all the scenes that remind you of homeland
that was never, never your home
the beating of its heart
late for the ritual of remembrance
and you think of the past tense
of loving a heartland,
the one place you have loved
but never loved you back.

Will you be the teacher who came back
from the Promised Land of some milk
some honey and so much grieving,
the last one poured oh so generously
on your early morning green tea?



A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Mar 28-07