“These people, both men and women, seem amphibious, and to be able to live on water as well as on the land, so well do they swim and dive. Five pieces of iron were thrown into the sea to them for the pleasure of seeing them exercise themselves. One of them was skillful enough to get all five of them, and in so short a time, that one can regard it as marvelous.”
            —observations of indigenous Filipinos by the Dutch in 1600, from Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, by Antonio de Morga

To be amphibious
is to breathe underwater          
gills and fins
illuminated in a flash of sun
to be sirenos1
es amar el mar
es tener cuerpos de agua2
desfrutar how the sea dances
along our spines
how it fills our hair
makes us weightless

We do not care if we are seen
taken as entertainment
desnudos
observados en un acto sagrado3

Our brown bodies split the water
no para conquista
kundi para sa unyon4

Our bangka5 are extensions
of our katawan ng tubig6.
Do you know which hands carved this wood?
Mula saang mga puno?7
Whose spirits guide us to the other side?

Hindi namin kailangan ng mga mapa8
Hindi namin kailangan ng mga kumpas                 
Feel the immense dagat move beneath us        

Can you feel it, through the thick hulls
of your conquering vessels?

We do not disrupt the harmony of things.

Can you plunge your hand into the sea
and bring up a fish?
Can you split one into two thousand pieces
so that every mouth is filled?   
Can you perform such the miracles
you describe in your holy book?          

Watched by mga anito9,
todos los seres vivos
nos protegen10

Bawat plankton, bawat maliit na hipon,
bawat nabubuhay na bagay11

Ser anfibias
upang maging kasuwato sa dagat12
is to breathe underwater.

 


1Both in Filipino and Spanish, this refers to mermen, but in Filipino folklore, while also including a version of a tantalizing creature (usually female) that leads fishermen to their deaths, sirenas/sirenos are are also engkantos or spirit-guardians of the sea. The colonial and indigenous influences in this mythology are both evident.

2“is to love the sea/is to have bodies of water”

3“naked/observed in a sacred act”

4These two lines show how Tagalog incorporated Spanish as one sees the shared words; it goes from Spanish, “not for conquest” to Tagalog “but for union”

5Bangka are Filipino outrigger boats with ancient origins that are carved from wood; it was believed that the spirit of the tree or an anito (guardian spirit) was imbued in the boat, especially through ritual consecration.

6“Bodies of water”

7“From which trees?”

8“We do not need maps / We do not need compasses”

9anito are ancestors, nature spirits, or deities in precolonial, indigenous Filipino systems, which were animistic. The word also can refer to statues and figures representing the spirits.

10“All living beings / protect us”

11“Each plankton, each tiny shrimp / each living thing”

12“To be in harmony with the sea”

Copyright © 2020 by Aimee Suzara. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 13, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

no pencil

on gelatine paper


no intricate live edge

of the Missouri


no breaking sod

to mine it for wheat


no magnate's gold to

drive our bodies into the fields


no wheat sliding east down

easements that pierce the treaty lands


no ghost of Dorothy

sits up in my body


no craft cocktail:

John Brown's Dugout              14 bucks             


no wet grass curls

above and beneath us


no tractorsfulls of

whiskey empties


no empty words

silting our throats up


no empty bowl

of cut-up peaches


no wombs lit

up with atrazine


no place but

that's just hearsay

Copyright © 2020 by Kerry Carnahan. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 18, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.