Up Mountains

[CRNDLSM]

I like this more each time I read it.
It seems like part 1 is a legend of how a mountain was made.  part 2 is generations later an event in the mountains life that illustrates it's developed character.  part 3 is the mountains metaphorical need to reproduce, and part 4 is its destruction through progressively more invasive habitation.

Up Mountains


1. Daragang Magayon: Prologue did you change it to Maria's to show the incoming cultural influences?  I thought a Prologue should be shorter than the rest of the work, and even though the line count is the same, there are about half as many words as the last part.

Magayon grew up to be at first I liked the inverted line count, but after noticing a few subtle repetitions later 
a beautiful woman.

Men loved her. Men really like this mirror
fought for her. Ulap
fought Linog, Pagtuga
for her. He won. She
ran to him. An arrow and all the punctuation 

followed. Ulap the almost simple language makes it seem more like a legend
embraced her, drew
the same point through
his heart. Together,
they fell. 

Pagtuga burned. 
Linog shook the earth. 
A mountain grew,
black as the night, 
obscured by white cloud.I wanted to see a little more definite pattern to the color white

2. Maria Cacao: After Typhoon Sendong

Cacao lumber scattered
along the surface -- woman
naked springing out
of muddy water -- white s4, s1, s3, s3
elder love invades.

Without music, the shadow
of her breast crosses
her navel, her boat
stirs her river
to the sea, and her voice

rings out: come, and the colon pattern, put one in the first part somewhere maybe?
send me your poor,
your sick, your suffering
children and old men,
let me lighten your burden.

Her mountain, shape
of heaven -- what a burden.I like bringing up burden for the last part, but this burden didn't need the repetition, what a burden seems too sarcastic for this stanza.

3. Maria Makiling: Ecological Study in Los Banos

If I were not this coarse a man,
always switching between
good Christian and vile Pagan
every change of company,
would you have appeared to me,

hot white lady of the mountain,
when I shut off my headlamp
and scrambled down slopes invaded
by American mahogany? But there is
a second error of my nature

insurmountable: never can I be
as humble as your farmer. Even you did this narrator know the legend to say this? 
couldn't guess at the strange speech
of the pale white man who pitched
his tent so close to your hut,

at the intellectual's lingua franca
as vital to me as my sex.

4. Maria Sinukuan: The White Man's Burden

Surrender now, for God is with us:
his bird, the eagle, is our light.
The black feathered boa that constricts
your throat with ticklish grip, that thins
heaven's air -- the glassy knife

that slides across the skin, that severs
your precious precious sex -- the lying Jew don't think it needs the double precious
and honest Christian purified
by a little cracker, cup of wine --
God shall turn them all to swine!

just as he shaved surrender's head
with summer rain and snow-like ash,
transformed her figs fat on the twigs
into slabs of spotted white,
then entered her homely cave

not with a torch I really like the closing line, this inversion makes me think that the torch would be assumed, but I didn't assume it.
but with a snuffing breeze.

Nice work, seems very thought out