(For those who took part in the yellow revolution)
It is a spectrum, this play of shades
And nuances like those that we say
With an idiom of idiocy and ignorance,
The same ones we use to camouflage
The other colors of our common sorrows
We who live by the moment and by the day
By the gifts of misery laid out before us
By the tender mercies of mass murdering
Compatriots and comrades in this hard life
And death, they who speak of yellow revolts
As if these were actions pure and pristine,
Immaculate in their claims to tentative truths
And generosity of heart even as they
Log the forest of our reason, they
Who owe us so much in terms of the languor
Of love, the small man's sacrifice of dreams,
Wasting them for nothing, for no-thing,
To beg for the big man's greater glory
In this our land as in other lands,
In this terror of a thousand risk-takings
In mountains cleared or savaged or raped
By machine and man, by vacuous intentions
And by that sense of purpose in pesos
For that search for yellows yellower
Than the ones we have around as ribbons
Tied to trees and in the barrels of guns
Or in coctail dresses for widows and sons,
They who have to keep on kneeling some more
Make penance for the dirt that gets into doors
Or the steps of prayer parlors for adorers,
Those who wait for the wind to calm down
Those who calm the wind with their candles
And incense sticks they burn with yellow lights,
The fire glowing as well in yellow to capture
The yellow sights, sounds, smells, these yellows
Of the procession that was to transform as well,
The yellows that dismissed the lifetime dictator
With his yellowed mind, with his yellowed soul,
Yellow heart and yellow mysteries, he who loved
The one who was offered in the yellow of an altar.
Aurelio S. Agcaoili
Dec. 2004
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