By MA. LORENA BARROS
Seventy-seven demands
Some trifting, 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 picketeers climbed up the
monument of the Tao and veiled
it with black cloth to symbolize
the death of academic freedom
In the campus.”
Our stillborn 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.
The Collegian published a series of poems considered part of the prevailing protest literature of the time. The publication of the poems coincided with the visit of then US President Richard Nixon. Some 500 UP students picketed in front of Malacañang to denounce the US presence in the Philippines. A prime characteristic of protest literature is its nationalist poetics. Serving as another form of instrument, these poems reported the true condition of the country.
On July 31, 1969, the Collegian published a series of poems considered part of the prevailing protest literature of the time. Among the writers who contributed was then-activist Lorena Barros.
