Mila Aguilar (a.k.a. Clarita Roja) was born in 1949 in Iloilo. She started writing poetry at the age of nine. She edited the school paper at the UP High School. At 18, she was features editor of the University of the Philippines' Philippine Collegian,and graduated with a BA English degree at UP Diliman. She took her master's degree, taught English at UP, and joined Graphic magazine. A progressive writer, she was among those hunted when Martial Law was declared in 1972.The Women Color Press, New York, published her poetry collection, A Comrade Is As Precious As a Rice Seedling (1984). Its second edition, l987, includes twelve from her collection of prison poems, Why Cage Pigeons? Some of these poems were also published in Pintig (1985), an anthology of prose and poetry by political prisoners, as well as numerous other publications in the Philippines and abroad. In 1996, the UP Press published her collection of poems, Journey: An Autobiography in Verse (1964-1995).
She has written for Manila Standard since 1995 to complement the underground tracts she wrote on the woman question, democratic centralism, the united front and revolutionary mass movements in the period when she was hunted. Her 48 video documentary titles, produced, written or directed by her (1989-1997), can be seen on her Web site: http://www.sequel.net/~pinoytok. As a webweaver, a term she invented, she has designed her own web pages as well as the website of an NGO.
She is teaching at the DECL, CAL, University of the Philippines, Diliman. Aguilar is at work on her 7th book of poems, tentatively entitled Poemes Suisse. She has temporarily postponed finishing her semi-autobiographical novel, One Woman's Testament, as she completes her long-delayed work on Tricksterism as a Filipino Survival Mechanism.
Work(s): The Thirst I Keep, Damn the Dictatorship, Love Wasted, My People Are, A Tale of Two Witches
(From Panitikan.ph. com)
SOMEDAY IS HERE
(For Merlie Alunan)
Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
It came in waves. Foul smells come in waves
Like the cars and the trucks on the highway
By my bedroom sounding like waves surging
Engulfing all sanity, insisting on the right to control
Your life and the babies unborn before and after you.
Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
The waters have been rising for years, skyscraper tall,
Rising and ebbing and rising again, smashing onto shores
Rushing down mountains while the earth under quakes
And sinks and ingests one third of humanity in its
Wake, in its wake without your even noticing it.
Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
The waters have turned bitter, who knows if it's gnawed
One third of the life in the ocean, and is Wormwood
Fukushima, and Chernobyl and Three Mile Island
And those two nuclear plants in Nebraska whose
Fate we can't fathom -- because they're hiding it?
Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
The locusts are already droning somewhere in
Afghanistan, stinging the Taliban and all else
With their scorpion tails, giving them five months to live
While their insides crumble, rumble and stumble
All over and they ask to die but death wouldn't take them
Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
Even the elect are deceived, the trumpets have sounded
The trumpets have sounded into their ears, into
Their ears but they did not hear, they refused to hear
As fire, smoke and sulfur gutted their land while
Their nation sent fire, smoke and sulfur into other lands.
Somedayishere somedayishere somedayishere
We are merely in wait for the two hundred million
Drones will they be? What are the seven thunders
Will they march into Israel or fly by the by? And yet
As we watch, do we change? Do we clasp our Creator
By the hem of His skirt and ask to be taken up with Him
Not someday, it is here, but now, while we can.
Not someday, it is here, but now, while we can.
- July 8, 2011
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