Tiempo, Edith. “Lament For the Littlest Fellow.”

 

The littlest fellow was a marmoset.

He held the bars and blinked his old man’s eyes.

You said he knew us, and took my arms and set

My fingers around the bars, with coaxing mimicries

Of squeak and twitter. “Now he thinks you are

Another marmoset in a cage.” A proud denial

Set you to laughing, shutting back a question far

Into my mind, something enormous and final.

The question was unasked but there is an answer.

Sometimes in your sleeping face upon the pillow,

I would catch our own little truant unaware;

He had fled from our pain and the dark room of our rage,

But I would snatch him back from yesterday and tomorrow.

You wake, and I bruise my hands on the living cage.

Edith Tiempo

Edith Cutaran Lopez-Tiempo (April 22, 1919 – August 21, 2011) was a Filipino poet, fiction writer, teacher and literary critic in the English language. She was conferred the National Artist Award for Literature in 1999.