Online Journal 4: Analysis of Acosta’s “Walang Kalabaw sa Cubao” and Santos’
“The God We Worship Live Next Door”.
The genre of poetry is synonymous with colorful language and pretty prose. Many a skilled poet could paint a scene so vivid and set an atmosphere so heavy that it could capture readers’ hearts and attention through even the fewest amount of words. To achieve such striking imagery, poems make liberal usage of figures of speech, namely similes and metaphors. The authors in today’s analysis, Ericson Acosta and Bienvenido N. Santos are notable examples in the topic of figurative language.
The title of Ericson Acosta’s “Walang Kalabaw sa Cubao”, while providing a clever bit of an internal rhyme, sounds like a no-brainer statement at face value. Of course, there wouldn’t be any carabaos in Cubao, why would a farm animal be in a city? The title is dropped in the first line of the poem and again in the last stanza:
Walang kalabaw sa Cubao:
Ang Cubao mismo ang kalabaw
At sila ang nakadapong langaw.
The poem describes Cubao as this bustling metropolis with many a sight and sound to experience. The grandiosity of the city is contrasted with how the poem portrays the people living there. Its inhabitants are shown to be unruly and depraved, engaging in all sorts of vices and are quick to quarrel and fight among themselves. Flies (langaw) are a common metaphor to symbolize moral degeneracy. And it goes without saying that flies are only a mild nuisance when compared to the carabao no matter how many choose to land on its back.
Personally, the poem feels like a condemnation of the heinous acts that occur in the city, brought on by the uncaring environment. The city, and society as a whole, cares not for the plight of the squabbling flies as when compared to the grand scheme of the carabao. This indifference only perpetuates the cycle of corruption already present in our modern world and it’s only a matter of time before the flies finally kill the seemingly unbothered carabao.
The relationship of the impoverished and the ruling class in society is also tackled in Bienvenido Santos’ “The Gods We Worship Live Next Door”. The titular gods are the rich elites. For all their splendor, these gods seem to care little for those under their dominion. In fact, they look upon them with disdain as they flaunt their wealth.
Our image of gods is that they are all-powerful and immortal beings. The so-called gods in the poem are shown to be opposite in that they catch colds and even die. The only thing that really separates them from regular people is their vast amount of wealth. While these old gods may die and are often outlived by the common folk, their children live on to continue their twisted legacy of greed and excess.