Jim Pascual Agustin
LAMENT
For thousands of years, poetry has provided words of care and consolation in the face of grief and loss. It has also given us language to protest and lament when beauty and innocence are threatened by those in power.
This month, the AVBOB Poetry Project explores a lament generously shared by Jim Pascual Agustin, a South African poet born in the Philippines but living in South Africa since 1994. His poems chronicle the everyday courage and beauty he sees around him, often in the face of inequality or injustice. In 2022, Deep South published Bloodred Dragonflies, a substantial selection of his poems across three decades. In 2024, Vhakololo Press published the South African edition of a new anthology, Crocodiles in Belfast, which features this particular poem.
Read the lament Jim shared and pay careful attention to how and why it moves you.
International Space Station, 23 July 2014
on a photo by Alexander Gerst
Light, invisible unless it strikes
something: a wall, a tree, a sliver
of smoke, your eye. Fireworks makers
know how to make light whirl
and dance, displacing the stars
of midsummer or grip of winter.
Entranced, one can only surrender.
If you didn’t know what the bursts of light
Alexander Gerst had captured in space,
you could be forgiven for thinking
they were beautiful, like filigree
or deep sea creatures. But there,
dark waters bordered
by a scattering of lights, the beach
where four children playing
were blown up.
We are shocked at the end of this poem, and we are meant to be. The closing lines are all the more disturbing because they are utterly unsentimental. We know nothing about the context that allowed these four children to be killed. And yet we care deeply about them. How does the poem accomplish this?
First of all, Agustin makes us feel that we are in safe territory. We are observing the effects of light, only visible when it strikes another object. The objects listed are also apparently neutral: a wall, a tree, a sliver of smoke.
Then, slowly, human beings are involved. By manipulating light, we are told, they can make it “whirl and dance”, changing the natural order and “displacing” what we would normally see in favour of what they would like us to surrender to. These manipulators are called “fireworks makers”. It is an odd word, but as we will see, Agustin knows exactly what he is doing by choosing it.
We are expecting Gerst’s photograph, taken from the air, to take us even deeper into this beautiful celebration of light. The poem warns us not to be complacent. If we did not know what Gerst’s photograph revealed, we are told, we could be forgiven for finding the burst of light it records beautiful. In other words, we already know that we should not think it beautiful by the end of the poem.
Then the terrible revelation comes. We have been preparing ourselves for it, but nothing can truly prepare us for this. What we took to be innocent “fireworks makers” have turned out to be arms manufacturers and killers of children. Of course, the beach and the context for the explosion are important. But what matters more is that those four children have become part of the scattered light captured on Gerst’s photograph. And thanks to this poem, they have become part of our collective memory.
In the next few days, write a lament for something or someone you have recently lost. Write it as if you can bring this thing or person back to life for as long as the poem lasts.
The annual AVBOB Poetry Competition opens for submissions on 1 August 2025. Visit www.avbobpoetry.co.za today and familiarise yourself with the competition rules.