Encounters at Cabalen

For Manang Fele Mann & Manang Francisca Javier

It is plural, this meeting
of minds, plural too
in their capacity for words
that bring in the healing
from the wounds, raw and unkind,
pestering and festering,
this continual discourtesies
of lies and what they can do
in their conjugal power
to destroy what love is
even if it abounds, well beyond
what a poem is, a boon
if it is love, beyond the dictator's touch,
to give as a gift to us.

She came with her bright light
and all you see are the many loves
of her vagabond heart,
she who has come all the way
from this nearness so far
we cannot touch her word
nor follow her laughter
to its counterpoint to reside
in the sacred places of our lives.

It is forgiveness she tells,
full and absolute
and she reminds you of her stories
their triumph beyond their conclusions
as she was with her sister
all through and through
in the blazing of roads and more
for us to go by in life
as in the way we dream of our homeland
our people in need of soul
spirit too in the way we say our word
like the trials we go through
in writing the first lines of our songs
when we come back again
once more in the company
of what was, this sacred past
we cannot go back to
not any longer, resisting
and resisting this forgetting
that has come to assault us,
we who have come
to make a pact with the word
that sings and sings for us.

I must thank you now:
two sisters like one, your joy
the conversion of sorrow
I have come to know.

And with you I laugh, laughing
louder than I should
in the company of strangers
with their buffet of stares
and approving eyes.

We partake of the food:
our recollections of events
that will heal us more and more.


A Solver Agcaoili
SM Megamall's Cabalen/Pasig
Dec 28, 2009