SERAFIN I. Plotria, Jr. is an award-winning broadcaster in Bacolod City, who also teaches communication, media, and languages at the University of Negros Occidental – Recoletos. Author of a children’s book, he was also the grand prize winner of the 2018 Peter’s Prize for Poetry.
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On Questions That Do Not Seek Answers
A reading of Peter Solis Nery’s “What the Sun Saw”
by Serafin I. Plotria, Jr.
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Peter Solis Nery’s “What the Sun Saw” is a perfect poem in a time and society like ours where indifference and curiosity often interchange swiftly like political colors or ideological stand. The poem showed Nery’s political and social sensitivities by particularly dissecting Extra-Judicial Killings and human rights violations, its impact to an individual, on the surviving members of the family, and to the society as a whole. Noteworthy here is that Nery successfully showed a detour from his usual poetic themes and audience.
“What the Sun Saw” opens with a line that asks a well-calculated question, not openly posited to find an answer, but to emphasize a point. ‘Where did the eagles fly to slip away’ (line 1) is a line not only meant to invoke an initial sense of space to set the stage or the imagery pattern of the poem, but to hammer away a strong point on the severity of the experiences and the intensity of emotions captured in the succeeding lines. Eagles are brave, cunning, and aggressive birds of prey not known to simply cower away; but in the opening line here, they are established to be afraid, and escaping from something. The second line ‘When your mother wailed out her heart?’ completes the thought initiated in the first line (a question when combined) and further drove the point that the experience is really a heart wrenching one.
Lines 3 to 8 followed the same stroke and developed a pattern that has incremental effects. At line 8, we could conclude that the poet is talking or asking a question to someone who may not be able to answer — forevermore. He is talking to a dead man, all right. But again, the whole of lines 1 up to 8 was not just meant as a series of questions that await definite answers; but rather, it is a profound description of what happened on the day the murdered body was discovered. Its sensory appeal can be likened to reading a headline story written poetically rather than journalistically.
The succeeding lines 9 to 12 bring the attention of the reader into the immediate, peripheral crowd other than the two mentioned in lines 2 and 4. Here, the poet leads the readers to hear the voices around, among the crowd, each one eager to pitch in their own opinion as they try to construct their own meaning and justification of the gruesome scene. Nery effectively invoked curiosity by linking the earlier poetic imageries to literal (and in our current rate of EJK numbers, we may consider trivial), and cerebral experiences.
Lines 13 and 14 together, ‘Were you a drug pusher, a political opponent’ and ‘An anti-government guerilla fighter?’ switches from the previous lines (with images appealing to the senses) into unassuming lines that beg for an intellectual inquiry rather than a poetic tour.
Introducing the wife in the middle part of the poem is even more dramatic than discovering her agony at the beginning of the poem. With this technique, the whole poem becomes larger than life by not just centering on husband-wife story (limiting it to a love poem). Lines 15 to 18 bring the whole poem back into the closest characters of the subject — the family. It opened with the other family members’ emotional reactions of the discovery, and closes back to the wife’s and the baby’s towards the end; as if reminding us that in times like these, the closest to us the most will feel the sharpest sting of pain.
The poem reiterates the fact that at the core of these victimizations, for whatever justification of the cause, the family suffers the most. These killings are so gruesome that even irrational animals — born to be wild, and sometimes evolved to become equipped to kill — are fleeing to escape the sinister human heart. The imagery of the wild running away heightened the level of atrocities captured here in Nery’s poem.
Line 19 leaves readers with a question that convicts rather than seeks enlightenment. Nery is either using the sun as a personified image to represent the whole ‘woke’ and watching civilized society self-condemned to apathy and indifference; or as a challenge to invoke spiritual justice from Whom Who Saw Everything — ‘All the just and unjust happenings’ in this sad and pitiful country, and the rest of the more miserable world./PN
