Poem for a Dedication

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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