Invisible the mountain routes to 
   strangers:
for rushing toes and inch-wide strip on 
   boulders
And for the hand that's free a twig to 
   grasp,
Or else headlong fall below to rocks
   and waterfalls of death so instant that 
To soon they're red with skulls of 
   carabaos.

But patient guides and teachers are the 
   masses:
Of forty mountains and a hundred rivers:
Of plowing, planting, weeding and the 
   harvest;
And of a dozen dialects that dwarf 
This foreign tongue we write each other in
Who must transcend our bourgeois 
   origins.
 

2

You want to know, companions of my 
   youth,
How much has changed the wild but shy 
   poet
Forever writing last poem after last poem
You hear he's dark as earth, barefoot
A turban around his head, a bolo at his 
   side,
His ballpen blown up to a long-barreled 
   gun:
Deeper still the struggling change inside,

Like husks of coconut he tears away
The billion layers of his selfishness
Or learns to cage his longing like the bird
Of legend, fire, and a song within his 
   chest.
Now of consequence is his anemia
   for lack of sleep; no longer for bohemia
The lumpen culturati, but for the people, 
   yes
He mixes metaphors but values more
A holographic and geometric memory
For mountains; not because they're there
But because the masses are there where
Roots are jigsaw puzzles he must piece 
   together.
Though he has been called a brown 
   Rimbaud,
He is not a bandit but a people's warrior.
 

3

We are tribeless and all tribes are ours.
We are homeless and all home are ours.
We are nameless and all names are ours.
   to the fascists we are the faceless enemy.
Who come, thieves in the night, angels of 
   death.
The ever moving, shining, secret eye of
   the storm.

The road less travelled by we've taken...
And that has made all the difference;
The barefoot army of the wilderness
We all should be in time. 
Awakened the masses are messiah.
Here among workers and peasants
Our lost generation has found its true, its
   only home.
 

Davao del Norte
January 1976