Memories Of Sirens

9 days before the flood torn October,
weeks after the bloody raid by hostile moros,
numbers of sickening sights of raped and murdered women
are fast subsiding,
ambulances' sirens and media exaggeration among
the fields of resistance are in total silence,
black crows and mice feast on the flesh of
the bloated cadavers along Sta. Barbara,
while the tidal water washes away the bones and sinews,
and the monsoon wind cleanses the fouled odor air
infested with rotten MNLF's propaganda,
such tragic scenes written with the ink of blood on the
pages of everyone's memory.

At last!
Everybody is free from the pandemonium of death,
gunpowder and violence,
this merciless war is nearly over,
but the wound it inflicted seems incurable,
its pain radiates worst than tooth ache,
the pus from it decapitates vision for unity,
like a cancer infected by a perpetual hatred.

Even then the corpse of the MNLF murderers
buried in a mass grave,
with them is a relentless aspiration worthless of dying for,
beliefs corrupted by distorted historical lies,
and they are just sodomized by one man's
political ambition,
yet the leaves of dead trees keep on falling,
slashed by the bullets of machine guns,
trauma still terrifies the spirits of individuals,
the city is besieged by terror,
and confusion reaches the point of dementia.

The ghost of war is deadlier than bullets,
memories disturbed by screams of little girls
killed beneath the fury of fire,
minds haunted perpetually by the helpless faces
of children dying in hunger,
and souls always trailed by the shadows of dead
mothers who left thousand of orphans. 

Gianni Pansensoy

Tears Under The Sun

Once on Saturday's mid-afternoon,
between the amethyst sky and Zamboanga City,
the blazing sun cut through it,
my sight caught on a paled skin widow of silky black hair,
sailing on the turbulence of the streets suffocated with blood,
she journeyed between shells of M-16 and mortars,
her eyes of black almonds,
showed the mosaic pictures of her heart in bitter color,
and began to shed tears of schizophrenic depression.

She walked through the lines of dead bodies,
eyes protruded on swollen faces,
fingers cut from bloated hands,
hacked legs scattered on the streets,
some lost their lives before skinned brutally,
a very painful torture committed by the terrorist MNL faction.

she knelt down before them,
trembling in anguish,
her soul,
imprisoned in a jail of stinky anger and retribution,
much more painful than death,
her sanity almost lost,
she held the cadaver of her kid by the hand,
hugged his body,
cold with pain,
his pale yellow skin darkened by gun powder,
the color of miserable death,
she cried like lioness,
the heart breaking roars flowed through with agony and sorrow.

Just 20 meters away from her,
fires razed the whole city into a bloody inferno,
the color of everything in everywhere : Purple,
above were clouds blackened by the gruesome
feast of massacre,
a huge black smoke swept across the battlefield
of mass destruction,
the graveyard for innocent victims,
and their souls blew with the blood-scented wind.