(translation from Filipino of Rebecca Añonuevo's "Sulok;" from Pananahan: Mga Tula, Talingdao Publishing House, 1999)
One morning, I woke myself with a question: for whom and what for am I living? and at once it seemed the loneliest question for which I had no immediate answer. The clock above my head pulses to mete out the hours, to wake those like me from sleep or those pretending to be asleep. The spoon and fork lie on the table within reach of anyone who wants to eat, to help them eat (unless the table gapes from hunger and from being lashed by sunlight). The fan, the lights, the earthenware stove, the flourishing orchids outside the house, our house, the store at the end of the street, my mother who wakes and sleeps in order to cook and do laundry, my father who likes listening and butting into the stories my sisters and I share, the barangay captain, the newly constructed waiting shed, the new day after a hurricane which once again sank a large boat, the cheerfulness of Sinatra songs I played over and over last night in the hope I could keep hope alive, the church and market and plaza, the man on the cross, the beggar sprawled face down on the cold and hot cement, the farmers and widows, my countrymen who work in other lands, the children singing and dancing and going to school, the soldier, the revolutionary, the priest, the teacher, the poet, the lovers— all of them who know what their living is for. I wish I could pretend, stroke my breast and with a confident voice offer a profound answer to elicit a public ovation. I don't envy everyone for what they know and the wisdom they have. Why do moments like these arrive unasked for, and yet you wade in solitude, dark and gloomy desolation, the kind you hide from the world so no one suspects, its cry that of a child you'll muzzle and press to your breast until it stops breathing.
