Orphaned Heritage Poem by Cheryl L. DaytecYañgot

Wearing Pierre Cardin neckties, they
come and go through the corridors of
dominion bearing surnames that divulge
their ethnic origin and cultural heritage
their air without a modicum of faint link
to the values that thrived on the bond
between the land and their mothers’ wombs
They care not that Bangan and her sisters
were pushed to bare their breasts to drive
away the usurpers come to destroy the
sacred burial grounds of their ancestors
They have not partaken of the wisdom
breathed by the dap-ay that shielded their
ancestors’ harvests and health from curse
In their swivel chair they dream of the cash
that gush from the water falls and the money
sprouting from trees in the thick forests
They ignore the cries of the womb
as it pleads for the land that sustains it.

From their cold dap-ay seats now of concrete,
the guardians of the ancient way of life
that perpetuated the womb watch helpless
like beaten war soldiers at the insolence
of the men whose time has yet to come
How they callously flaunt the power to
delet their people’s nexus to the past and
catapult the culture of the doomed; all that
matters is the clinking of the gold, oblivious
that love of it is the harbinger of death
They who are orphaned from their
surnames while their fathers still breath,
they are alienated from the land that
perpetuated their bloodline since ages
A life of greed is the scourge of a lineage
It steals the rice grains of generations
and causes the gut of the few to burst
as they party in their Pierre Cardin ties
The womb that endured a wing of long
insults will commiserate with the abused
land and massacre the kernel it nurtures

Land is life; the bloodline ends with it