Wednesday, March 29, 2006 @5:49 PM
notes from the marginsThe blackboard has its secrets:
the flaky chalk crooned its saddest
the day the teacher first wrote
that faint line in the board’s margins.
There is no madness here, the teacher
had whispered, only the
knowledge of silenced histories(that learned volumes balk from
with delirious fear).
What the fancy textbooks do not
say is this: the truth is
an irreversible
dis-ease. And so he starts -
Look beyond the aging classroom
walls, past the sorry rows of cheap
armchairs - the weeping streets
glisten with tales of harried feet
and spattered blood!
Barrios shrivel in hunger;
wages are never, never enough.
Children fend themselves off
with odd jobs just to make it
to Grade 2. Farther down
the road, landed despots
bathe in their pilferage. Factory
owners crush boycotts like tin cans.
Pretty girls open their legs
in the nearest KTV bar,while mothers go to Europe
to wipe some invalid’s ass
as though it excretes gold.
At the center, an illegitimate president
springs a rampage against dissent.
I.
The school day comes to an end:
the cleaners sweep the last speck of dirt
curtains calm their adolescent rustling
the chairs are rearranged to immaculate rows
conjugations and equations
and spitting chemicals fall
wryly into silence,
but the scribblings on the board
shudder in the wake of an
engine’s mutinous roar (don’t we
know that death comes to ashen
towns in solitary motorcycles?).
five gunshots and a spray of
papers across the dying sky
but the truth is an irreversible dis-ease;
notes from the margins crawl even
across perished lands.
* Napoleon Pornasdoro, 54, teacher-activist, was shot to death near Quezon National High School in Brgy. Iyam, Lucena City where he teaches, four days after President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo declared a State of National Emergency.
- march 4, 2006 -