Friday, January 23, 2004

A Coded Poem to A Guerilla Unit

Argee Guevarra is a political science major, and formerly the vice-president of the Ateneo Student Council in 1987. He primarily writes about love and activism. This poem is a letter describing an “article.” Yet, the reader could perceive that the “article” being described is a revolutionary scheme.
Recently, after his successful knee surgery in Hong Kong, former President Joseph Estrada said that he would unite the opposition. This clearly means that he and his cronies would try to overthrow the current Macapagal administration.

Luigi Singson

A CODED POEM TO A GUERILLA UNIT
Argee Guevarra

March 28, 1987
TO:?’s & !’s
RE: CORRECT GRAMMAR USAGE

Comrades,

A dot in the first sentence
Of the last yellow paragraph
On a red-letter manifesto
Is but a period
Prefacing the epilogue.
It punctuates the tempo
In finishing the destined lines
Which makes the end
Inevitable.

Your in struggle,

P.S. Anarchic masses of dots
constitute a blot

Source: Guevara, Argee. Eros de Guerreros.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

haha. this peom is funny. :) well, this describes how people see guerillas, they are just like small dots - negligible and irrelevant. but when these dots come togehter, they are able to form something - something we couldn't imagine to have come from tiny dots.
- annalou maxine l. pagador

Anonymous said...

Wow a light amusing poem to show a rather serious issue. Alone the guerillas can do nothing, but together they are a force to be reckoned with.
-Ceferino Luta III

Anonymous said...

What makes this poem interesting is because it is written in a unique manner. It makes use of punctuation marks in order to express different kinds of moods. It’s quite clever that the poem addresses this poem to “?’s and !’s”, instead of using the traditional way of addressing a specific name or company. The guerilla unit being referred here, is experiencing mixed feelings of “?’s (a question mark may denote confusion, bewilderment and a menagerie of other moods) and !’s (an exclamation point may mean a lot of things such as alarm, excitement, etc.). Because of this, the leader of the guerilla unit addresses his fellow comrades to revolt, for “masses of dots constitute a blot”, i.e. If people (dots) unite, they may be able to create a formidable army (blot).

- Victoria Hernandez R16