Amidst the mass slayings — senseless, unbridled curtailment of human lives—and all the other diabolic trampling of human rights of the Lumads of Mindanao — peoples of conscience from all over the globe — individuals, classes, sectors, institutions and mere citizens who have learned to value the common endowments for precious human existence — the humanity of human life . . . have hearkened to the calls for justice by the very victims of the mandate of impunity imposed by Philippine State.
Thenceforth comes this versified response as an expression of communion with the cause of the Lumad peoples . . . tattooed on the dermis of the soul. . . not as mere graffiti on the heart skin . . . but as an informed insight into the bottom line of the Mindanao issue, namely: the plunder of the Lumads’ ancestral lands by the merchants of greed and deceit through the apparatus of the State.
The chief of state, President Noynoy Aquino, ironically, a scion of an icon lying protrate on the tarmac of history, all at once, comes out from the portal of hypocrisy into the bloodstained stretches of his “matuwid na daan”– Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! — of the indigenous people’s blood.
Ancestral Lands
Let all of us speak,
Let the little fireballs fall
from our flaming tongues
sought to be doused with the chill
thrown up by mouths of steel
Let all of us speak
Let our alphabets prick your souls
our verses and chants knock
on your conscience doors, while
mountain forest winds play musical
our fears, cowardices, daringnesses,
Where sharp thorns stick out
on Pantaron’s garden of tongues
and footways of dreams – songs of
struggles we have flown like arrows
by the bowstrings of our eyes
Spurting rhythmic as waters of spring
our balyans sing our heartthrobs from cracks
on mountain slopes. Oh, those are wounds!
whitened by ages, wrinkles of pain,
scarred footmarks of Tuwaang
in his trek to the skyworld to hearken
to the call of Mandalangan god of war.
Let us by ourselves scan the sheets
of winds colored by the native dye
in our eyes, anger jutting
on our necks, gongs gonging
in our breasts, our feet pounding
loud and hard on the earth.
On the earth, here where our words
must sprout and grow, here where
the grasses have rooted deep, so deep!
Here where our dreams must bloom!
Here on the earth of our love!
Here where we must all stand upright!
Here on the dear land of our life!
. . .
History will proclaim its verdict of justice to all the fallen Lumads in vindication of their exemplary heroism and steadfast commitment to the cause of their tribal ideals and struggles. The “guillotine” shall fall hard on the neck of President Noynoy and all the other lapdogs of American Imperialism who hold the puppet strings that direct the anti-people policies of Malacanang and the inhuman acts and deeds of the Military Establishment.
