Mheagan F. Japitana

The poem Taj Mahal, translated by Mustansir Dalvi, is a reflective and critical exploration of love, memory, and the power structures embedded in cultural monuments. Addressed intimately to the speaker’s beloved, it opens with an acknowledgment of the Taj Mahal’s reputation as the "quintessence of ardour" a global symbol of eternal love. Yet, in the very next breath, the speaker invites the beloved to meet “some place else.” This refrain, which frames both the beginning and end of the poem, immediately signals that the writer does not wish their love to be associated with the grandeur and historical baggage of the monument. While recognizing its aesthetic beauty, the speaker questions the values it represents and the silenced histories it conceals. The Taj Mahal, often romanticized, is here stripped of its mythic purity and placed in a harsher historical light. The writer calls it one of the “edifices” and “tombs” that are “relics of the conceit of emperors,” emphasizing that...

Cirilo F. Bautista’s "Third World Geography"  A searing indictment of post-colonial failure, using razor-sharp imagery and corrosive irony to map a nation suffocating under tyranny, economic ruin, and stolen hope. The poem opens with an absence—a "country without miracles" lying "heavy on the map"—immediately evoking a landscape crushed by unfulfilled promise. Central to this despair is the figure of power a ruler who "commandeered all hopes," sealing them in a sack only to dismiss them as "just a handful of feathers."  This devastating irony forms the poem’s nucleus, exposing the tyrant’s moral bankruptcy as he trivializes the lives he controls. His claim that governance is a feather-light burden " in peace time " rings perversely hollow against the reality of citizens kneeling on " parched earth," praying for rice while their "useless words" vanish into the wind. Here, Bautista masterfully conflates his...

  "Vows exchanged, silence, then the kiss" 

The Tide Took Them Before I Learn to Swim         The poem " Gabu " masterfully captures the sea's unforgiving nature as both literal force and profound metaphor. Its imagery paints a coastal battleground where waves wage their eternal war against the shore, reducing what was once vibrant to a desolate wasteland. This ceaseless conflict becomes a mirror for time's cruel puzzle it creates through destruction, reveals through erosion, and teaches us value through loss. The poem's most devastating insight lies in its observation that what we forfeit becomes "most loved and dear. " Like the shore that only understands its own beauty as it disappears grain by grain, we humans measure love's depth by absence rather than presence. The sea's indifference to our attachments transforms into life's central tragedy we are granted the capacity for eternal love in a world bound by temporary conditions. "It is the sea pursues a habit of shore" T...