for Mrs. Rosa Henson, the first Filipina woman to accept Japanese reparation 
            payment for her  suffering as a comfort woman for Japanese soldiers in a brothel 
            for nine months during World War II. 

Monsoon country, so expectedly, wind uproots memory.
Rain is the voice of a storyteller, one without pause
like my nightly return to the hundred days of bulb light
and curtains, laughter and weight of soldiers outside, lined up.

Rain, tell me the story once again; mine, don’t pause--
sounds of belts unbuckle, dawn; blood gorges to a rush downward.
Let me weigh their laughter one by one, past rooms of curtains,
where my body tilts, reaching out, upward, tied to a post

with a belt, the dawn of memory, the rush of sound:
"Tanaka--," I scream. My husband awakens, "Who is he--Tanaka?"
My body tilts upward, reaching you, untying a dream.
Tanaka, my dear, he and the darkness are one, always waiting

and awake, a whisper at night, a husband to his wife, a soldier
to me, a Japanese soldier without a choice, breathing through limbs.
Tanaka in the darkness was as dear as the wait to escape.
Tanaka in the morning was as cruel as the smell of his peers,

these Japanese whose choices were my limbs, mouth and breath.
I never told you, my dear, that every night, I leave my hands beside you
to carry the rest back to the cruelty of their smell, of their mornings:
nine months of war in this hut, my body as food, my life as nothing.

If I tell you how it was, will you hold my hands, surrender to memory?
Soon I will disappear, running naked in a hut, pursued by ropes, shadows.
Nine months: a war for the rest of my life, for the rest of nothing,
telling the rain, the wind, voices of storytellers, ones without pause,

how I disappeared to be naked as rope, naked as its shadow,
in this hut of fears, hands limp and tied, slipping into thoughts;
I told the rain to carry my voice, the wind to hold it without pause.
Now, in my monsoon country, so expectedly, wind uproots memory.

This poem received the 1998 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from Poetry Society of America. Copyright © 1998 by Bino A. Realuyo

Filipineza 

              In the modern Greek dictionary, the word "Filipineza" means "maid." 

If I became the brown woman mistaken
for a shadow, please tell your people I’m a tree.
Or its curling root above ground, like fingers without a rag,

without the buckets of thirst to wipe clean your mirrorlike floors.
My mother warned me about the disappearance of Elena.
But I left her and told her it won’t happen to me.

The better to work here in a house full of faces I don’t recognize.
Shame is less a burden if spoken in the language of soap and stain.
My whole country cleans houses for food, so that

the cleaning ends with the mothers, and the daughters
will have someone clean for them, and never leave
my country to spend years of conversations with dirt.

When I get up, I stand like a tree, feet steady, back firm.
From here, I can see Elena’s island, where she bore a child
by a married man whose floors she washed for years,

whose body stained her memory until she left in the thick
of rain, unseen yet now surviving in the uncertain tongues
of the newly-arrived. Like the silence in the circling motions

of our hands, she becomes part myth, part mortal, part soap.

Filipeneza first appeared in The Philippine Free Press and is forthcoming in The Nation. Copyright © 1999 by Bino A. Realuyo
 

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