This is totally swiped, without permission, from Krip Yuson’s Philippine Star column — an excerpt from Naya Valdellon’s poem “Woman in Verses,” recent first-prize winner of the first Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards, first-prize winner of the second Meritage Press Holiday Poetry Contest, and recent graduate in Creative Writing from Ateneo:

This year’s return to the town
of my birth has made me conceive
how some things have not changed –
the same women can still be heard
chanting the passion, the pious
are at their pews, the contrite
hide behind the confessional screen
atoning for moments of passion
while the procession moves on.

No need to join those penitents
lashing rivers and rivulets of red
on their backs — these women have
known pain, their songs may as well
have been written in their blood
first spilling at the body’s ripening,
tender skin tearing at the willing
bite into the fruit of desire, labored
breathing at the womb’s harvesting.

You can read another lovely poem of hers here.

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