Cavern of Death

Echo the strangled moans
Of the shadows lurking
In your bottomless pit
Where dried tears of broken
Hopes walk with the fallen
Leaves of the dreams I
Once nurtured in my depths —

Now dried and breathless:
Just mere remnants of what
Could be that did not become.


Let go of the dark, thick liquid
In your crevice, threatening
To burst anytime and flood
The abyss of your nothingness.
The once-pulsating optimism
That fired at my veins and
Lighted my waking moments —

Now still and lifeless:
Just mere illusion that acquired
Flesh; already beaten and dead.




For those who perished in the Glorietta Blast and everyone who died in the hand of political injustice.


I first read some updates on the Glorietta blast before reading one of the novels in my collection: a somewhat romantic but definitely political novel (Of Love and Shadow by Isabel Allende) set in a Latin American country on the grip of dictatorship, and this is what I’ve become — utterly DEPRESSED. As the main characters in the novel discover the cavern into which the bodies of the desaparecidos (missing people) were thrown, images of those who died in Glorietta and the skeletons of the dug bodies in the novel kept flashing in my mind. So grotesque the sight I conjured that demons started beseeching me to write this depressing piece. Sorry…


//Sherma E. Benosa
27 October 2007; 3:37am