THE ROCK AND THE METAPHYSICS OF TIME
By Rene Estella Amper

Invocation:

Ginoo of the harvest moon,
Bathala of the barangay,
Render this rock unshaken yet
To the neurolic atomies
Of trouble time!

CHAPTER ONE: THE ROCK

Lime-white, looming-white, gigantic: the rock squats like an echo of the greener pastures of our forefathers. Hewn out of the immemorial romance of the land and the sea, billions of years ago, it has outlasted the quivering flesh of man, having been purified by storms, having tasted the dusts of wanton uncare.
This rock, its bigness remote, its whiteness primeval bears the scars of the dreams and fulfillment of our brown brothers.

This rock looming in crooked pentameters by the sea is a deathless sonata of the height of man’s ambitions and the bluntness of the seedlings in the convolutions of the brain.

This rock tells its story to the willow-winds; it has an irresistibility to these ghostly wanderers that suck the women’s skirt and stir the water holes. And the wind giggle,

It tells its story to the restless sea, and the sea heaves and sighs.
It tells its story to our brown brothers: out my people are not poems: they do not listen.

But the rock must stand flowerless, and seedless, defiant to the tentacles of decomposition: and unwanted wasteland transposed into a graveyard of memory and desire.

CHAPTER TWO: THE TOWN

The Angelus bell: after that the gray evening creeping cat-feet over the slants of gold-green hills nearby, enfolding the coco palms, the flatland of the town and then the hearts of my people.
The walls of cut stones, grayish-old and mossy-laden: memorabilia of Spain’s foothold over the land over a half century ago listen in numbered muteness to my people praying the Angelus ode to the Virgin: the rhythmic monotone of lowered voices and upraised spirit hand in hand to the cadence of the church bell.
The belfry heaves a call to my people that they might render thanks to Bathala and the Virgin for the toils and the blessings, the laughters and the tears of the fleeing day.

CHAPTER THREE: MY PEOPLE
My people are brown: tense of spirit, proud openhearted, dreamers of God- things, knotted of flesh: their life is an epic of honor, short and simple, unchronicled, alien to fevered brains of troubled time.

My brown brothers are the alluvia of the stream of time: the dusts of the ancestors bud in their flesh and bones:

Give them a lyre and they would not touch it;
Give them laughter and they would take;
Give them misery and they would dwell in it;
Give them torments and they would die in it;
Give them death and they would not want to die.