As you bid adieu
We celebrate your life
Your womanhood
Your motherhood
A woman of strength, patience, kindness
Love unsaid yet overflowing
The beacon and the light
Yesterday, today, and the future.
Your eyes have seen the wrath of life
Your ears have heard its agony
Yet you had more eyes and ears than us
To commune with the world beyond
Your hands, rough from the harsh soil
Bare feet calloused by the earth
Heart pained by the storms
The unshed tears say you took them all.
Record says you’re 92
But what do we really know?
We know that you have sired
Generations of your kind
Your womb was a spring of life
A spring that flows so far and wide
Bound in your wisdom
Linked by your blood
As you fly to rejoin our ancestors
Fly away with all the ills of this world
Drop them all in the between
Where no one can feel the pain.
This is not goodbye, it is not the end
You live in us, among us
Together with those, gone before us
Be our shield, be our guide.
Ikaan mo et am-in nan ate.
Danum id todey ya id gedangan ay menlamnin
Et was-in di menlamlamnin ta maid mangmangwani en ate.
Vaya con dios.
(For Maria Maliked Bongdowen Bayang, April 20, 1929 - December 7, 2022)
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