06/01/10Days after Mt. Pinatubo eruptedin 1991, when the ash merely floated down, no longer shoveled over us, when we could hear our low hoarse voices name our dead, mourn in the open even before they were found, dragonflies appeared in clouds descending past the rugged outline of ripped walls, snapped homes. They hovered in a procession of wings along the margin of packed debris where roads grew mouths. Some of us had armfuls of a home left. Those without carried the sun on a stick of wax and went. But the dragonflies remained in our backyards, a constant hum by our uprooted gates, huddled over cracked cement along walkways like curious folk. Like road signs on wings, they pointed to gumamela, santan shrubs, ipil-ipil, anahaw, all still green under the grey, even the makahiya blooming two inches from the ground. S.L. Corsua 10/07/08 (revised: 06/01/10) * On 16 July 1990, an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 struck the northern part of the Philippines. Not a full year had passed when another disaster occurred: the violent eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in June 1991. Ash cloud, ashfall, ash deposits turned the affected provinces into ash land; but, I remember that time for the dragonflies, too. So many died, so many things lost, so many dragonflies. * Do visit the Tuesday Poem site, and read the featured poem picked by this week's editor, Bernadette Keating. Once you're there, you might also be interested in checking out the poems posted by the contributors; the direct links to said poems are indicated in the sidebar. Cheers. |