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poetry
In memoriam
by Edgar B. Maranan
'my daughters are now blessed'
April 13,2001: The Philippine boat ML Annahada, overloaded with passengers, capsized off the Jolo island coast. Eighty-seven people en route to Malaysia drowned, including twenty-seven children aged 3 months to 9 years.
We are alone, no matter that the world
consoles us, in our grief of losing those
we should precede in death.
Who chooses us to share, between ourselves,
the sudden absence of these laughing youth
who could someday be jewels of the earth?
Gone, bloated flotsam, suspended in the cold
waters of a heartless sea, their eyes gazeless
and irreplaceable by all the pearls we crave.
In these dark regions, we ply the poorer routes,
consign our lives, with all the dreams we muster,
to the hands of chance, their inept helmsman.
No brine can further hurt my eyes, they saw
the bright faces of my daughters in a spell
of brief enchantment, dreaming of Sandakan.
O Annahada! What cursed vessel do we pit
against the laws of fate's unfathomed currents?
We paid our passage on a teeming craft
and prayed, all huddled on the listing stern.
Can recompense, the carcasses of men of greed
restore a young girl's strand of hair or tiny grip?
In all my days, I will remember only the silence
as my daughters took in sea, trapped underneath,
my name struggling in their drowning throats.
My daughters are now blessed in the earth
while I must journey on, waterlogged in grief.
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