Do they Know

Do they know,
Those men,
that I feel the pain
Of women raped
And when I resist
I am then a crazy Filipina

You know, those kinds
That are like
Emotional roller coasters
Said one white boy
About us

Do they know
That we,
Are a shamanic culture
That we traveled between
The worlds of different races and nations
Sojourning, leaving, escaping
Going back to the abject poverty
Of our families
Of our country
Of our souls unfed, untold, miseducated
Wounded by these times
Of people not knowing

Do they know
That we,
Are a shamanic culture
That we travel invisibly
Into your world
And we sense your feelings
Ways of knowing inherited
By an intuitive culture
We feel you molesting us with your eyes
Familiar as uncles and fathers watching us grow
into our long legs, black hair, silky skin
we are not oblivious to intentions of greed
and insecurity
for our nation has been plagued
since racism implanted by the seed of imperialism
in our soil.


Do they know
That we,
Are a shamanic culture
That we traveled between the worlds
Of humans and spirits
Sojourning, leaving, escaping
Going back to the ignorance of humanity
Of forgetting our divinity
And how it is not given
But earned through lifetimes
Of knowing,
Who we are.

Do they not know
Because we don’t know
We are still searching
For identity shattered
Into millions of pieces
As we traveled between worlds
Losing, leaving, forgetting
Finding once again
Slowly by slowly
Regaining wholeness

But sometimes they hold the pieces
We have lost
And they try
To reconstruct us
Into images
Distorted reflections of a broken past
Stabbing us in the back
Forcing us to conform to them
Lodging shattered pieces of mirrors
Into our skin.

But do they know
That we have felt this pain before.
It is not new
So we know the path to healing
And still their wounds are festering
Unattended
And we shall ascend sooner
As the hell they have created
We have climbed over
And traveled between worlds

Do they know who we are?