Images from Different Times, Poems of Now
In this Issue (8 Full Pages): Digital Art by Junjun Sta. Ana
• Painting by Karen Shea • Poetry: Jim Pascual Agustin • Luisa A. Igloria • Cesar Ruiz Aquino
(OUR PAGES links now 'clickable')
The Foster-Miller TALON Robot Examines A Body in Baghdad (with permission from wikileaks.org)
Jim Pascual Agustin
TALON Robot Examines A Body
1
They are too backward, the dead.
They get in the way
of technological advances
such as this.
Imagine
The time it takes
to whirr metal arms,
tank-like tracks,
gears, hydraulics
The patience it demands
to focus and refocus
hardened eyes,
in order to position
A single robot in place.
To poke and prod one body,
certify it is dead.
No longer considered
A threat by those who own
this piece of armory
worth more than a village
burnt whole.
2
Apart from special lenses,
heat and movement
sensors, other less known
devices built into these
roaming machines
There is a person
who has to monitor the scraps
of rendered facts,
someone who has to stare
at every shard of flesh.
This person remains on the verge
of conflict throughout the whole
operation, armed with clinical
precision, making certainties
of random targets.
No information gathered
in scenes like this
will reveal anything
useful to the surviving
family of the dead,
Even if there were any left.
3
This one body alone demands
to be examined in detail:
minute facts irrelevant
to strategic reports.
Who gave permission
to touch his remains
this way, with a mechanical
hand, distant?
But this body will not surrender.
It is beyond the reach
of the most powerful
tools of destruction.
When there were so many
faces of strangers emptying
the marketplace,
whose did he seek?
Of those who clothed
him as he emerged
from childhood, who did
he remember most, last?
Will anyone know how carefully
his young fingers treasured
the very first feather
in his hand?
Gustav Caillebotte, Paris Street, Rainy Day. 1877. Art Institute of Chicago(La Place de l'Europe, temps de pluie)
Luisa A. Igloria
La indolencia de los Filipinos…
Intimacy Deserves A Closer Look
on the boulevards, where a mural assembles nightly.
Bodies the hue of scrap metal beneath train tracks,
feathered by neon. My friend the pathologist walks
back to Manila Hotel, cuts through the park and comes
across lit fires in iron gratings; the third eye
of a Sanyo rice cooker blinks the hours from a billboard.
A man scrubs himself with a pumice stone in the fountain,
a family of four goes to sleep next to their faded mango trishaw;
so languid even in repose, he writes, and I could tell him how
here as in that part of the world, the spirit relinquishes itself:
lizards free-fall to the ground, bells’ tongues rend the Angelus—
but like history he expounds on the imprecision of Chinese
water-clocks and the industry of Northerners, the brighter
ink of spiked holly berries against white, the augur-shaped
bodies of tropical parasites, the people that scan
the skies for rain and omen birds, the fear of avian flu.
(Indiana Review, winter 2007; Finalist, 2007 Indiana Review Poetry Prize)
Labels: Art. Filipino, Digital Art, Filipinas, Kilates, Marne, Philippines, Photography, picturebook, Poetry
