Petra and the Wolf
An ekphrasis, published on the Philippine Free Press Online.
I wrote this after Quisumbing-Ramilo’s “Coco Rouge,” which you can see below:
The baby monkey at Punta Hagdan, Dao, Antique.
My grandmother in the 1940’s.
She lived until the magnificent age of 96, and she passed away today. My mum told me that a couple of months ago, on one of her visits to my grandmother’s home in Antique, she caught my grandma leafing through a crumbly photo album.
My grandma pointed at each photo, each faded person, with a wizened finger. “Dead. Dead. He’s dead. She’s dead. Dead,” and then she looked up, looked at my mother, looked around her. “And I,” she wondered out loud, “am I still alive?
I comfort myself with the thought that my grandfather’s been happily biding his time in the Great Wherever, waiting for his wife to show up, in the bloom of her youth, my grandfather also forever young, the cirrhosis gone, the emphysema burned away, his beauty and her beauty ready to clash again in quick succession forever, my grandfather ready to be scolded and to be forgiven, again in quick succession. And to tell her, yes, yes, finally, you are alive.
So I guess I wrote a poem!
