Rebellious Sonnets

By Ricaredo Demetillo

1

How could the cowering child believe that God
Loved and forgave, when my stern father, in
Whose hands the bamboo quivered to a rod,
Kneeled by my side? I felt the straps of sin
And disobedience, lashing my body raw,
When sunlight riddled pastures and I ran,
Forgetting furrows and the tyrant hoe
That blistered hatred in my taut hot hands.

God menaced me, and when the text was read
How Adam, having chewed forbidden fruits,
Hid in the fearful garden, the ominous tread
Of judgment crashed above me and I cried.
The startled audience eddied by my side,
And father loomed large in his righteous boots.

2

Once as a child, I thought God was as near
As Grandma’s icon on the leaning wall
And as benign, for it inclined an ear
As if it were not wood to listen. All
My heart reposed beneath its candled feet.
The palpitating noons, with longing, brought
Me suppliant, a fugitive from heat,
Before its presence. In its face I sought
A surer kindness than what kin or friends
Could dole me from the hurry of their steps.
Then God receded, and I felt the fiends
Howl in my ears as on the day I tipped
The icon with a curious finger, and
I felt ant-pellets leak on my shocked child’s hands.

3

As petty words betray love that it dies
A slow death, so my childhood piety,
Directed to a god I thought lived in the high
Imperious heaven, was betrayed likewise,
Not once or twice but many. Once in church,

I doffed my silk red-feathered cap and left
It on my patron’s pedestal, a perch
Of surest trust. How should know a theft,
Which would rob me doubly, could be done
Beneath my trusted patron’s feet? For I,
Enthralled by censers, incense, and the sound
Of priestly orisons, did see no one;
Until, the mystic rapture spent, my eyes
Discovered loss. Sobs sowed a bitter ground.

4

Grandmother, stiff as starchy olive-drab,
Got knee-corns as a gift from God; for she
Would rise each morning to rout a cab
Church-ward, where she wore out her rosary.
The noon which brought the laborer to eat
His brown rice and dried fish, would see her go
To labor at devotions in the heat
Until she spent her strength in cramping awe.
And when the vespers clanged her last Ave,
Stars trooping singly like pale convent girls
Out on a pious airing on the street,
Nun-like, she cautioned narrow paths for me.
But wayward, I, not heeding, thought of curls
Blown in my face and slimly tiptoed feet.

5

The town oppressed me, for the pallid priest
Droned to his flock a decalog of stone
Which taught decorum to their Sunday best
And laced the ladies in their corselets of bone.

I fled the proper streets and choose a path
Across the frank loose meadow to the lake.
The silted ripples lapped and cooled my wrath.
I was a bronzed god bared against the brake.

Then as I dangled luxuriant on a stone,
The waters nibbling at my feet, I gave
Shouts that amazed the birds, one a ruby-red.
Boldly I hurled defiance at the town
Huddled behind me like an open grave
Of dull concrete clasping the mannered dead.

6

What should we worship in this time of wrath,
When wise men calculate a marvelous Star
Gutters in heaven? Who will guide the path
Of rustics in darkness as the sirens jar
The jumpy silence? There is no startled hill
Where dreams are broadcast, brilliant as the host
Which gave one utterance to goatherds, till
The darkness fluttered — none that we can boast.

We peer the heavens and see, diminishing,
The kind god in a fecund universe,
That monstrous hollow giving planets birth.
And as we peer, we feel our knowledge sting.
We hug our loneliness against that curse
And, siren-warned, we burrow in the earth.