Post by thepoetslizard on Oct 10, 2008 16:05:00 GMT 2
Angela Manalang-Gloria
Bio from the ALIWW website
tinyurl.com/5vmvpr
"Revolt from Hymen"
(1940)
O to be free at last, to sleep at last
As infants sleep within the womb of rest!
To stir and stirring find no blackness vast
With passion weighted down upon the breast,
To turn the face this way and that and feel
No kisses festering on it like sores,
To be alone at last, broken the seal
That marks the flesh no better than a whore's!
(Web source: Meritage Press, Babaylan Speaks site:
www.meritagepress.com/bspeaks_april.htm )
"Querida"
(1940)
The door is closed, the curtains drawn within
One room, a brilliant question mark of light...
Outside her gate an empty limousine
Waits in the brimming emptiness of night.
Old Maid Walking on a City Street* (1950)
She had a way of walking through concupiscence
And past the graces her fingers never twirled:
Because her mind refused the heavy burden,
Her broad feet shovelled up the world.
"To the Man I Married"
You are my earth and all the earth implies:
The gravity that ballasts me in space,
The air I breathe, the land that stills my cries
For food and shelter against devouring days.
You are the eart whose orbit marks my way
And sets my north and south, my east and west,
You are the final, elemented clay
The driven heart must turn to for its rest.
If in your arms that hold me now so near
I lift my keening thoughts to Helicon
As trees long rooted to the eart uprear
Their quickening leaves and flowers to the sun,
You who are earth, O never doubt that I
Need you no less because I need the sky!
Source: Man of Earth: An Anthology of Filipino and Verses From English, 1905 to the Present ed. Gemino Abad; Ateneo de Manila University Press - a work of three volumes: A Native Clearing (1993), A Habit of Shores (1999), The Future Perfect (2001)
