February 20, 2011

STRIKE


Seventy-seven demands
some trifling, some
deep and huge. 
But all inarticulate
the glottals of the dumb

Somewhere back
We had forgotten speech
the correspondence of
sense of utterance. Now
wordless
sightless
numb
We march back and forth
mouths working
We know that the evil is great
but cannot begin to speak it.

“Two picketers climbed up the
monument of the Tao and veiled
it with black cloth to symbolize
the death of academic freedom
in the campus.”

Our still born gods
We bury with dumb gestures.
Oh we are unable to speak it!
We cannot begin to speak it.

Smashed glass
grief
a drop of blood on the asphalt
two drops
ten
the red seeps through our blindness

We have cast,
 the first rock.

-  Ma. Lorena Barros
   Phil. Collegian, July 31, l969












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