The Pestle: A War Cry Against Mindless Toil

by Roger B. Rueda

Edith Tiempo’s The Pestle is not just a poem—it is a blistering indictment. It is a gut punch, a wake-up call, a damning verdict on what happens when strength and beauty are wasted in mindless, repetitive, soul-crushing labor.

And yet, we—yes, we, the so-called resilient Filipinos—glorify this suffering. We sing praises of the worker who breaks their back, the farmer who toils under the sun, the teacher who works beyond her pay grade. We celebrate struggle as if it were a badge of honor. We romanticize hardship because we have been conditioned to accept it as our fate.

Let me be clear: This is not strength. This is surrender.

Tiempo’s poem drips with exhaustion. It paints the picture of two figures, once divine, now reduced to nothing more than cogs in a machine that never stops turning. Malakas and Maganda—yes, our so-called ancestors, the original Filipinos—were meant to be powerful, were meant to be great. But look at them now, burned in a thousand pots, broken by their own pestle, storing their treasures in a maggot-infested home.

Do you see the tragedy? They were never supposed to be slaves to their own labor. And yet, here they are. Here we are.

We wake up before the sun rises, commute in jam-packed trains like sardines in a can, work ourselves into the ground, and come home to a house that the government will never care to fix. Our leaders, comfortably sitting in air-conditioned offices, preach “hard work” and “sacrifice” as they pocket public funds and fly first class to Geneva.

The pestle is beating out time—our time, our lives, our stolen futures. And we, the so-called resilient, let it.

But why? Why do we let the system beat us into submission? Because we have been trained to believe that suffering is noble. That if we just keep grinding, keep sacrificing, keep enduring, someday, we will be rewarded.

Let me tell you the cold, hard truth: we won’t.

Tiempo knew this. That is why she wrote this poem—not as a lullaby, not as a tribute to the “virtue” of hard work, but as a brutal exposure of our collective delusion.

And yet, we still refuse to listen.

The last lines of the poem slap us in the face: Our tough hands shake and our sweaty lips smirk and lie, we had stored our treasures in a maggoty home.

We lie to ourselves. We pretend that our labor is meaningful, productive, fulfilling. We justify the injustice of our exhaustion. But in reality, we are burning alive in a system that does not care if we turn to ash.

So I ask you: When will we stop mistaking suffering for strength? When will we stop letting the pestle grind us into the dirt?

If this poem teaches us anything, it is this: Hard work without justice is just another form of slavery.

And if we don’t want to end up like Tiempo’s broken Malakas and Maganda—bent, battered, betrayed by our own efforts—then it is time to throw down the pestle and break the system that holds it.

The only question is: Do we have the courage?

 

The Pestle

by Edith L. Tiempo

… in the beginning the sky hung low over the earth … and the woman took off her head and her crescent combs and hung them up on the sky, the more freely to work. As her pestle struck the hard earth again and again, it began to rise, rise …
—The Origin of the Moon and the Stars, A Philippine myth

… the bamboo split and out stepped Malakas [Strong] and Maganda [Beautiful], the first man and woman.
—The Story of the Creation, A Philippine myth

On the bank the wash-stick is beating out time,
Time and wise words and riddles in a wooden ring;
Why should he listen, just to cross its dark message? If he,
A good smith beating his tempered muscles into plows,
And she (in powers), folding her mellowed safety between
bleached brows.

Once wrought for Beauty and Strength, if they be
Splinters from the cracked baton,
They shouldn’t listen to that crude tattoo!
To engrave its heresies through some crumbling bole—
Why should they? They, the divine stems? Yet strange, he
stones it free,
Burns himself in a thousand pots. He is not done.
And she?—he sees her through that fire while
White lice plucked, hopping thick in the smoke.
Old woman, let leave the wash-stick in the sun;
(The pestle sucked the thigh-bone comb
And the beads of baked clay high, too high)
Our tough hands shake and our sweaty lips smirk and lie,
We had stored our treasures in a maggoty home.