Rowena, Playing in the Sun

• God, who stirred the void and in Motion’s birth
• Revealed yourself; the warm limbs wake
• Along the dark stairways, the far eyes life to take
• The fixed commotion of the stars, their dim furious speed
• Predictive in the blood; the cupped hands hold for the spinning sun
• Till all this reaching tips the rim of heaven to the earth,
• Spilling the primal colors from the splitting of a seed,
• Wavering the tall green like a great sea waking,
• And in the golden light, tiny hands lifting, falling,
• Turning in god’s own orbit, my golden one.

Edith L. Tiempo (1919–2011) was a Filipina poet and fiction-writer who wrote in the English language. In her poems, Tiempo attempted to present a verbal embodiment of significant personal experiences. Together with her late husband Edilberto K. Tiempo, Edith Tiempo founded and directed the Silliman National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City, which has discovered some of the Philippines’ newest and brightest writers. Tiempo received one of the Philippines’ most prestigious literary awards, the National Artist Award for Literature, in 1999.