‘A Rain Scene’ is another poem by Alain Russ Dimzon which I like very much. The poem won First Place in the Home Life Poetry Contest in 1999. That year my fellow Generoso Opulencia at the 41st UP National Writer Workshop got the Second Place for his poem ‘Regarding Flowers from La Trinidad.’ ‘Paper Boat’ by Ulysses Aparece got the Third Place,’ so ‘A Rain Scene’ had to face stiff competition for the First Place as the shortlisted poems that year were very agreeable and illuminating, making poetry a vicarious form of social life and human predicament and delectation. I am sure it was difficult for the judges to vacillate on them. If I had been one of the judges then, my preference and taste would have been ‘A Rain Scene,’ too.
Dimzon’s poem is striking with slim splits and text cataloguing. It is artfully light, yet it is very deep – it is not easy to get to the bottom of it in the beginning. It seems it is saying no more than the literal truth, for it had, as if it was a taxi, a thick perspex partition between the passenger (the reader) and the driver (the poet). The reader has to go over the simplicity of the poem, then he/she can start taking wing to the world of feminism and womanhood or impoverishment or social inequality or whatsoever.
There seems a contradiction between its form and connotations. It is his way, inventive and cognisant as he is, of compressing a weighty and thoughtful material into a compact poem. His style is slick and visually artless, moving me, so my great idea starts with it as it simplifies the complex.
It gives an admirably succinct account of a woman fish peddler, a mother who will do everything for her children and a widow/a single mother who has to take care of her children by herself despite her implicit feebleness and lack of education. She is left with trials and tribulations of everyday life, taken unawares when her husband died. It shows how Filipino women in the countryside or coastal areas need empowerment to be able to be more spirited and prolific, in control and clever, fearless and impervious when their husbands die or leave them for whatever reason.
It signals the need of the government to pass laws that safeguard widows and give them resources to support their families. It points out how single mothers in the Philippines are ignored because how treacherous the weather is, they have to work to feed their children, for even the basics of support cannot be given by the government, so poor widows need to go from house to house to sell their fish/vegetables/wares by nightfall. They need to bear their poverty and inattention by authorities, in solitude, though we’ve known now how the pork barrel of some legislators has been plundered by depraved government people. Was the government money used as it should be and in all conscience, no Filipino would suffer from extreme poverty, no Filipino would become down-and-out.
The widow persona in the poem is a very strong and brave woman. She ignores the blast of the roofs though it drowns her voice as she yells out. Perhaps, she chooses not to beg because she doesn’t want to be an object of pity amongst other people and her neighbours. Perhaps, she wants to meet their needs indefinitely without degrading her pride and self-respect. Perhaps, she wants to put her foot down despite bad nature and adversity, for her love for all her children is unconditional. And perhaps to her, the only all-enduring and selfless love is that of a mother for her children. The reader can only speculate the consciousness of the widow fish peddler because the poet presents the poem like a painting or a photograph – everything can be worked out through a scene, graphic and peripheral, physical and definite, cynical and plain. The effect of the poem is purely analytical and then that is the time when emotion comes in.
The woman is ‘isang-kahig-isang-tuka’ (one scratch of foot in the ground, one peck at a grain) as she hurries, tracing the neighbourhood alleys. Thus, she needs to work even if she doesn’t feel well or even if the rain is about to bucket down. When a strong typhoon like Yolanda comes, her family can be trapped by hunger for days or weeks. This is the consequence, too, of having a lot of children and when a husband dies, no one but the wife will have to shoulder all the responsibility of the deceased husband. Worst, the husband has not taken out insurance on his life, covering payment for his children’s food and education. It shows the plight of Filipino families struggling for survival because the government is unresponsive and inattentive. It doesn’t give communities means of support.
The poem works like fireworks to me. It burns attractively to the different levels of my imaginings, revealing different designs and shades of colours and delight in the obscurity of my intelligence and common sense. Its simplicity is illusory because it lights in my mind with varied insights and social and non-physical involvement or connexion.
I told you then when I reviewed Dimzon’s ‘Breakfast’ that he is a feminist, because of the number of poems he has written on women. The focal point for him is the women who are under social circumstances and how they delimit themselves mechanically (like the carabao in my poem ‘Carabaohood’) or imperceptibly or unthinkingly and how they give away/fight out for their rights.
Its word-based arrangement is very accurate, forming enigmatic formulary for such a thought and awareness, so it is inspiring and perceptible to me who loves poems similar to those published in The New Yorker. Dimzon is one of the rare poets in this country whose philosophy is very forward-thinking and artistically new.
Anyway, here is ‘A Rain Scene’:
A Rain Scene
by Alain Russ Dimzon
Under a sky
That is ripped
By lightning
And is about
To cry,
The woman
Fish peddler
Mounts a basket
On her head.
On her head
She bears
The fish
And the tonnage
Of a lost husband
And the lives
Of her children.
Yelling
With a voice
Drowned
By the blast
Of the roofs,
She hurries,
Tracing
The neighbourhood alleys.
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