Merlie Alunan

A Sillimanian poet is set to receive her seventh Palanca win. Merlie Alunan won First Prize for Poetry in English for her collection entitled “Tales of the Spider Woman.”

Alunan, who received her M.A. in Creative Writing from Silliman University in 1975, is a professor at the University of the Philippines in Tacloban, where she resides. She has received numerous awards for her writing, including the Lillian Jerome Thornton Award for Nonfiction, Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas, and the Philippines Free Press Literary Awards. Her books of poetry include Hearthstone, Sacred Tree (Anvil, 1993) and Amina among the Angels (UP Press, 1997). Her other works also include Kabilin: 100 Years of Negros Oriental and the anthology Fern Garden: An Anthology of Women Writing in the South.

“My collections is a little too hard to describe,” Alunan says of her winning poetry. “’Tale of the Spider Woman’ is a weird love poem. [But I’m] feeling good about this win, because I had a mind that I’m not writing poetry that’s like the poetry coming out today, like a bit out of date. So it’s good to win.”

She will receive the prize on 1 September 2010 in ceremonies to honor this year’s roster of literary winners in Manila Peninsula Hotel in Makati.

The Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature is the Philippines’ most prestigious and longest-running literary award. Established in 1950, the prize has also been awarded to other Sillimanian writers, including National Artist for Literature Edith Tiempo, Edilberto Tiempo, Rowena Torrevillas, Leoncio Derriada, Marjorie Evasco, Anthony Tan, Jaime An Lim, Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Bobby Flores Villasis, Lakambini Sitoy, Timothy Montes, and Ian Rosales Casocot. (SUCAC) 

HERE IS AN EXAMPLE OF POEM WRITTEN BY: MERLIE ALUNAN

TALE OF THE SPIDERWOMAN

BY: MERLIE ALUNAN

Pyres of leaves burn away summer.

Cicada shells pile under the marsh grass,

still memorial of seasons past.

I’ve no words for these—

lean boys and slender girls pass by my window

drinking the sun on their golden skin.

Apple-breasted women with melons in their bellies

snitch sprigs of basil from my herb pots,

and curious-eyed strangers scan the veiled glass

for glimpses of my blurred face, but hurry off

with any stranger’s indifference.

How endless the mazes I inhabit,

layer on layer of silence shield me.

Odd monsters breed here, I warrant.

I myself daily grow smaller and smaller until

almost invisible. Fuzz on my skin, my eyes

multiply a hundredfold in this darkness

and split the light in thousand prisms—

and now I can see what’s before and after.

I become light as air, my sweetness distils

to fatal potency. I practice a patience

vaster than ten worlds. I wait.

`If, at last, the merest rumor of your scent

warms the air drifting to my door,

I shall shake my thin thighs loose.

My hair will grow back in the usual places,

my eyes regain their focus, my ears

will hear words and speeches again.

Cicadas will chirr live under the marsh grass.

Perhaps it would be June,

the green returning to the trees.

When your shadow crosses my door,

please enter without fear.

But remember not to ask where I’d been

or what had fed me in this empty room

curtained with fine webs of silk.

Ignore the seethe of all my memories.

Come, take my hand.

I am human at your touch.

SOURCES: 

• http://merliemalunan.blogspot.com/
• http://poieinkaiprattein.org/poetry/merlie-m-alunan/tale-of-the-spiderwoman---poems-by-merlie-m-alunan/