what kind of rule
could overthrow a fool
and leave the land
with no stain?
--Suzanne Vega, "Song of Sand"
from the PDI:
"Despite 114 dead (from ERVIs), polls ‘generally peaceful’ -- PNP"
susmaryosep.
***
eto pa. disturbing text from Kris Lacaba:
"My lola Gracia Licad Lanot, 89, physically-handicapped, wheelchair-bound, was unable to completely fill out her ballot because my tita was not permitted to assist her. (This is) in violation of the provision in the BEI handbook that an 'assistor' may 'fill out the ballot of an illiterate or physically-challenged person...if his/her condition is readily obvious.' This happened in Precinct 4564-A (for Barangay South Triangle) at the Kamuning Elementary School."
buti pa mga undead at mga nakalilipad, nakaboboto.
***
From Rosmarie Waldrop’s poem, “The Attraction of the Ground” This is a segment from the second section of her book, Lawn of Excluded Middle
The silence, which matted my hair like a room with the windows shut too long, filled with your breath. As if you didn’t need the weight of words in your lungs to keep your body from dispersing like so many molecules over an empty field. Being a woman and without history, I wanted to explore how the grain of the world runs, hoping for backward and forward, the way sentences breathe even this side of explanation. But you claimed that words absorb all perspective and blot out the view just as certain parts of the body obscure others on the curve of desire. Or again, as the message gets lost in the long run, while we still see the messenger panting, unflagging, through the centuries. I had thought it went the other way round and was surprised as he came out of my mouth in his toga, without even a raincoat. I had to lean far out the window to follow his now unencumbered course, speeding your theory towards a horizon flat and true as a spirit level.
thanks to emong de borja, who forwarded this after reading my previous ramblings on the I.
