“The only explanation is you, dear city. This is the end of our discussion. There is no other culprit.” (lines 12 – 14)—thus concludes “Dear City”, one of the many prose poems in Dark Hours, a 2005 poetry collection by Filipino poet, and University of the Philippines alumna and former professor Conchitina Cruz that tackle the different societal evils that haunt the city and its children. The last three lines, albeit still presented in the same blunt voice initially established in the poem, serve as the simple yet effective shock therapy that allows even the most thick-skinned reader to cringe a bit. But to say that the text is merely a guilt trip covered with the veneer of artful poetry is in no way what it really is—to think of that is shortsightedness on our part; more than anything else, the poem is a wailing cry for help.
Given the author’s personal background, it is rather convenient for us, readers, to assume that the city of interest discussed and addressed to here in the poem is the central metropolitan area of the author’s country: Manila. Nonetheless, the poem “Dear City”, if not the entire poetry collection, mirrors not only the problems inherent to our country’s setting, but also those of other societies or places in which progress is stunted by the blinkered attitude of the people towards their own mother soil. Throughout the poem, the city’s own children do not just turn their backs on her; thinking better of it, they obstinately throw stones at their own city, putting the blame on her for her flaws, not even musing for a while that they, themselves, imposed these flaws. In short, the city’s own people stripped it of its innocence. The heightened use of language in the poem, most particularly with the powerful imagery it offers is enough to outline a picture of a city deteriorating, succumbing from the wounds inflicted by its own people who wouldn’t even admit their own share of guilt of how their city ended up the way it is. They profess themselves as “men and women of honor” yet they wouldn’t even have the common decency to be accountable to their own ill ways and self-victimizing acts, to take at least a portion of the blame—the responsibility—, which is in truth completely theirs in the first place. More so, they simply dismiss the ailing condition of the city as something irrefutably, and quite ironically, the product of the city’s own fault. By closing the discussion with those abovementioned lines, which tell more about the narrow-mindedness in the city people’s end than they do about the city itself, “we” in the poem leaves no room for any more counter-argument—sealing it with the irrevocable conviction that the city and it alone is the guilty party, thus end of story.
That Cruz wrote about this single aspect of the multiple-faced problem of our society in her poem “Dear City” is a successful utility in reminding the readers of the evils the society’s facing. Try as a reader might, (s)he surely wouldn’t recover for a long while from being jolted out of his/her stupor, and would but re-interpret what (s)he has just read with a more discerning eye and with a mind working in a more personal plane, afterwards.
Works Cited
“Dear City.” Cruz, Conchitina. Dark Hours. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2005. 3.
scripturient bibliophile 