by Thomas Leonard Shaw

 

She wept all over again until her tears were dry. She realized that the words she had spoken were really a curse on Pinang. She began calling the plant Pinang. As the years passed, people began to call it “pinya,” a word in Filipino which means the juicy, edible tropical fruit we all know as pineapple.

Why the Piña has a hundred eyes1

I.

The irony was that from simple blindness

was born a thousand visions, all yearning

the looking back into the regret of perhaps.

Flesh curling, unfurling into skin

rough, a warning to one’s touch,

a tragedy of bloom, the peril of harvest.

When others demand Pinya

I imagine the shape of someone’s arms

wrapped around a body shivering,

too tiny to be left alone,

too frail to weather the cold,

too much of a testament to what is loved

after the departure. Here the ache

belongs to the eyes that stare back

and remind me of the guilt of language.

II.

The story was an old folktale

meant to explain the birth of fruit

and teach a lesson to children

about filial piety and the danger

of words. Maybe one should consider

the trajectory of loss. A mother

bears the years till what remains

is flesh and blood and the irony

that lessons proceed only after the tragedy.

So what is gained after the child is lost

if not for an old wife’s tale, but what if

the old wife was real, what if the fruit

was the child and the aftermath the body 

that the tongue that curls around swallows

until no words remain. Only the sight of a garden

and the memory of grief’s harvest.

 

III.

In the morning when mother wakes, a sun bursts into color. A grasshopper gathers fibers for winter. The garden melts into radiance. You are here you say. The ability to speak coils around the tongue, a finger brandishes pinpricks. The first part of the tragedy is the discovery that it is a tragedy. Here light treads and then threads into itself. Its claim is your uncovering. Now revelation, after revealing. Discover unfolding as blooming. Mother lives in the stories passed down from mouth to hand to finger to soil. You are here you see. Until the legend says let there be darkness.

 1 “Why the Piña has a hundred eyes,” in ABAKADA (Babaylan Denmark, 2010). https://paperzz.com/doc/1782925/why-the-pi%C3%B1a-has-a-hundred-eyes—-babaylan-denmark

 

Thomas Leonard Shaw is a queer, liminal poet-theorist, and a faculty member at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, UP Diliman. He was a poetry fellow at the 1st Philippine National LGBTQ Writers’ Workshop, the 1st Cebu Young Writers Studio, the 59th Silliman University National Writers’ Workshop, and a panelist for the Cebu Writers’ Workshop. Thomas has been published in several different countries.  He is also a poetry and critical essay editor for the Katitikan Literary Journal.

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