Song of the Migrant Workers

 Just saw this posted on somebody's blog online. This was actually printed on cards  (bookmarks) in 2007, so Fr. Joselito Salvador, SVD, had written me from Taipei, where it somehow found its way. He had the poem printed and distributed to some 2,000 migrant workers during the Migrant Workers Day celebration there in September of that year. On the other side of the bookmark is a translation of the poem in Kapampangan by Poet Tony M. Pena. Fr. Joselito had emailed me that the Kapampangan version was part of his wanting to inspire the OFWs there and his campaign to promote and preserve our language.  I wrote the poem in 2007 in answer to the Filipino OFWs having been denigrated in a newspaper column to the chagrin of thousands of readers.  A certain Malu wrote as foreword "This is really for my father who has been a migrant worker for years," or something to that effect. But in that blog, the blogger omitted the rest of the intro and it appears the poem's author is the Malu whose father was "a migrant worker..."  To all other bloggers reprinting my poems without permission, please, please, do not parse wrongly.  

Tuesday, August 28, 2007

SONG OF THE MIGRANT WORKERS
by Blanca Datuin

We are figures hunched from morn till sunset.
Crowned with broad-brimmed hats and
silhouetted against the blazing sun,
we pick the prize of the earth that
feeds humanity.

The dawn breaks, we break the dawn, 
we stay bent till the dark falls to shroud us. 
Never mind the pain on our back, fingers 
turned purple, creamed with soil and swelling
with the richness of terra firma.

Never mind the knees that tremble, summer sweat
that drips aplenty to bathe the body ready to crawl
to a bed cushioned with dreams of a rising bird;
never mind winter that numbs ears, hands and fingers.

We look only to the feel of green in our palm
to send our folks back home: they who thirst
for fathers and mothers gone to a strange land,
to bring them back the fruits of a teeming graceland.

To you whom the scourge and agony of labor is alien,
please do not draw the curtains of darkness on us;
our bodies, though worn-out, are still warm like yours;
you feed on us; we feed on you. We're bound together.
                                                       (c) 2007