Sa loob at labas ng bayan cong saui
Kaliluha'i siyang nangyayaring Hari.
Within and without my hapless country
Tyranny has come to reign.
~ Francisco Balagtas, "Florante at Laura"
Today she walks a tended path in the prairie,
the surviving forest held in check at its edges.
Someone has stacked dead wood and broken shingles
in the open space where bonfires burned each year
for a century. Prints of passing animals,
furtive signs of life in the margins-what nature
or habit of mind returns to that which is
not present? On summer's eves, this lawn might have played
host to scenes from alien histories: for instance,
that verse play in Tagalog, where abandoned prince
Florante laments his fate in the woods, unabashed
cries heard by the banished moor Aladdin. Sharing
their common narratives-betrayal and desire
turning fathers into lovers and murderers,
kingdoms recently reduced to panic and rubble-
they recognize each other in their suffering.
She imagines their mixed idioms in the wilderness
turning enmity into love and pity; imagines
rain in cities falling on the beheaded, the loud
static of crickets, scoring and scoring the nights.
The auit or awit (song) was a verse form in vernacular Tagalog. In the original form, the auit typically consisted of four rhyming aaaa lines per stanza, with each line having around twelve syllables, and many figures of speech. One of the most famous auits is Francisco Balagtas' 339-stanza "Florante at Laura" (1861).
(Ragdale, summer 2006)
top