The Light in One's Blood¹

Gemino Abad

To seek our way of thinking
by which our country is found,
I know but do not know,
for its language too is lost.
To find our trail up a mountain
without a spirit guide –
here is no space where words in use
might stake a claim.

Speaking is fraught with other speech.
Through all our fathers, Spain
and America had invented our souls
and wrought our land and history.
How shall I think counter to the thick
originating grain of their thought?
“I have not made or accepted
their words. My voice holds them at bay.”

Look then without words,
nor jump about like ticks
missing their dumb meat.
If there be enough blood yet
in our story for counterpoise,
in speech take no meaning
from elsewhere,
be more thorough than passion.

Whence does one come
when he speaks, his eyes lighting up?
Before speech, all words are dead,
their legends blind.
No one comes from language,
the truth is what words dream.
One speaks, and language comes,
the light in one’s blood.

What ravening lions roar
in our blood for our thoughts?
We too have our own thunder
from lost insurrections;
even the present seems a gift,
but mostly unopened.
So much thought is scattered
like grain upon burnt ground.

The soil is ours, and inters
the secret bones of our loss.
We must know our loss, all things
that ghost our time.
Speak now, collect every bone,
lay the pieces together.
Here is true speaking,
a mountain rises beneath our feet!

Is language already given?
– yet we have its use:
a double forgery!
No essences are fixed by words.
Proceed by evacuation
of first seeing; in emptiness
gather the pieces
of breaking light.

No language is beforehand
but its shadow; nothing
in the script, but the other’s myth
that now frets your soul.

What breathed there before the words
took their hue and creed?
How, with the same words,
shall another tale be told?

The same words, but not the given,
for void its speech of empire!
Our eyes must claim their right
to our landscape and its names.
What cataract of other minds
has flooded their sight?
We must even fall from our own sky
to find our earth again.

——

¹ Father and Daughter / Gemino H. Abad and Cyan R. Abad (Anvil, 1996):15-17; In Ordinary Time: Poems, Parables, Poetics 1973-2003 (UP Press, 2004):117-19; Budhi / A Journal of Ideas and Culture (Ateneo de Manila University), vol. XII, nos. 2 & 3, 2008: 80-82; Returning a Borrowed Tongue, ed. Nick Carbô (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1995): 3-5; Solidarity, Jul-Dec 1994: 71.