![]() Today, my daughter Gabriela read a new poem that I wrote for the Unveiling and Dedication of the Virginia Historical Marker Honoring Filipino Sailors, at the Philippine CulturalCenter, Virginia Beach. (I was unable to attend because I was giving a presentation at around the same time, for the Poetry Society of Virginia's Annual Conference/Festival.) The quote directly below this is from a 2017 article from the Filipino American National Historical Society(FANHS) website, and I used it as epigraph to the poem: “...several thousand Filipinos had been recruited into the US Navy and other branches of the military during the American colonial period ... As a result of increased need for personnel ... , the Navy began recruiting Filipinos at a rate of 1,000 a year in 1952; this was increased to 2,000 annually in 1954. Filipinos ... were limited to the steward rank until 1971, when an agreement was reached with the Philippine State Department to discard the practice. Stewards were responsible for providing cooking and cleaning for the ship and domestic service to officers and their families: food service, cleaning, laundry, and chores.” - from Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS) online * * * WE, SEAFARERS by Luisa A. Igloria 20th Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia Forward and bow, the hull’s built resistance to restive water; each port a pin on the scalloped edge of a map. As for leaving an archipelago— as if it was a simple matter of plowing into the foam, wave after wave turning like a page. What of home and history? No, not that one with a date and an explorer’s name attached to it, nor his naming of our ancestors’ lands after his king. Rather, those gridless skies above green canopies and mangrove forests, islands threaded through with rivers and streams, with fabled animals and birds whose songs could stun you into stone. You’d find, coming back to these histories, spaces where brooks sounded, as they cut through forests of fern and lady slipper orchids, as they fused with the nightly discourse of frogs. Sleeping volcanoes, houses on stilts or perched on hills, their roofs touched by the same sun that colored the fields and shimmered the fish which expeditions tagged, numbered, and held in vats-- They still float in the cool basement of a museum, part of the hundred thousand archives of our waters. Fortune, we are told, favors the bold. Fortune, we dreamed, waited at the end of months- long journeys as we set sail then for a fabled land. Passage extracts a price from everyone— some of us, paying with our labor on the very vessels that took us here. But here we are today, across the land, across the globe. We, architects of rafts and smaller vessels that narrow distances between shores. We, no longer just recruits, apprentices, messboys, servants, stewards. We, builders of galleons. We, who learned to captain our craft by the stars.
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![]() Christopher Newport University is holding its 40th annual Writers Conference 06 & 07 May 2022 (Friday and Saturday). I hope to see some of you there! I've been kindly invited to give the 07 May/Saturday Keynote at 9:00 AM (it's an in-person event) at the Gaines Theatre, CNU Campus ~ "Opening to the World Again: Writing Poetry From Out of This Time of Vulnerability" Among poetry’s most powerful effects are its ability to unpeel complex layers of experience; to help us find keys which might open up spaces that were closed, hidden, unseen, unspoken. Especially, but not only in times of great difficulty, it might seem safer to keep the world at a distance. But poems offer the invitation to keep ourselves open, and the promise and grace that it is possible to make our way to the articulation of what we think we don’t even have adequate words for. to all the lovely poets who participated in my April 2022 NaPoMo Poetry Prompt-a-Day. Your prompts were all so fantastic. Everyone can go back to revisit these prompts at the Virginia Poets Database where they are archived under "Poetry Spotlight," "National Poetry Month 2022." (And while you're there, especially if you're a VA poet, please consider submitting your information to the database.)
Another big THANK YOU to the VIRGINIA PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATORS (formerly Virginia Press Women), for the Virginia Newsmaker of the Year (2022) Award you gave me yesterday. It's an honor to join the ranks of other awardees through the years. Here are some pictures from yesterday's Awards Luncheon in Richmond; in one of them, I'm with my nominator, Gail Kent. |
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