Who is Ninoy Aquino? Asked the Young Man

INTRO:
The question lands in the middle of a table of older men. What follows is not an answer but a reckoning — with names and places carried in the body like old wounds, with the distance between a generation that lived through something and the one that inherited only the silence after.

By Vincent R. Pozon

Now all at once our hands cranked the air
waving to waken thickened tongues,
syllables soused in beer and vinegar

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Stilled, we raised our Nescafe diamond glasses,
stilled, we watched the street grow old
and took the curious lad inside us

A stranger bumped me on a sidewalk,
slipping a leaflet into my hand,
"He is coming home on Sunday"

We did not tell the boy about revising
virtues to put fish on the table,
and that which we abhorred, we ignored.

That he did not know the name did not
disturb us, we lied, then we raised
our Nescafe diamond glasses of beer.