UNPRONOUNCEABLE

Perhaps it was learning your name

That first made me curious about language:

For a child to say and spell

And disregard phonetics

Was a musical and unique thing:

Ee-low-hee-oh, you’d tell me,

Then speak the letters slowly

For me to write: Eulogio.

At school we were asked often

“Mother’s name? Father’s name?”

As if we needed to put names

To the faces that nuzzled us

And it gave me a placeholder

A way to anchor myself in the world

I was the daughter of a father

With a magical and wondrous name.

HIS JOURNEY

I know you will deny what someone else

Snickering

Told me: you left town in the dead of night.

At first I think you are a criminal

Escaping some fate

Running from some youthful delinquency

In that barrio hours from Manila

At the foot of the San Marcos mountains

A town of three streets

Where the ylang-ylang fills the night air.

Then I learn you are just a criminal of the heart

Having stolen the love of a girl

Before leaving:

A dream of glory, perhaps, at least

Of minor success—to be a better farmer than your father.

What was in your pockets the night you left?

Some photos certainly

And all the pesos you had carefully saved

For the tramp steamer fare

(wrapped, perhaps in a hanky your mother sewed);

But did you carry anything for luck?

Good fortune?

Or did you just depend on your comb and razor

To keep you groomed

And think your looks would get you by

Just as happened with Isobel’s heart?

How were you to know

The farther you traveled

The longer she waited for you;

I think you vowed to return

Not knowing how the ocean drowns our promises.

LATE WINTER IN CONNECTICUT

(On a funeral in the Philippines)

There was a band

(That still plays here in my mind

In a February Connecticut)

Slightly sour and puny in the tropical dust

That puffs up around their sandaled toes.

Solemnly they march

Attending to their tunes:

The horns and drums in

Constant battle for dominance,

Humidity plastering shirts to skin,

Hair in wet clumps of sweat

At the foot of the San Marcos mountains

Past the muddy palayan

Through the barrio streets,

Slowing at the church

To play us in

Like reluctant trout on a line.

And when we spilled back out

Onto the church’s sizzling stone plaza

Squinting in the sun

The raggedy musicians reclaimed us

To follow their tinny harmonies

In the roads to the cemetery

Where their raucous lullaby

Led you to your darkest sleep, my father,

And us to shaded verandas,

The mournful followers

Of those tropical pied pipers.

Oh Daddy

Dad

The music only stopped

When they were sealing up your grave.

Sandra Salinas Newton is a Filipina-American Professor Emeritus of English. Her published works include Enjoying the Arts: Poetry (1977) and Enjoying the Arts: Film (1978), and a short story, “The Balikbayan,” in Philippine American Short Stories (Giraffe Books, 1997). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Apricity Magazine, Evening Street Review, Fauxmoir, Neologism Poetry Journal, New Note Poetry, OPEN: Journal of Arts and Letters and Vita Brevis Press, Oberon Poetry Journal 2021, Vita Brevis’ 3rd Anthology, Vultures and Doves, and The Woolf. She earned her B.A. from The City College of New York, her M.A. from Hunter College, and her Ph.D. from Fordham University. Her website is www.snewton.net.