Ah, Summer!

When life was simple

Summer was the school term's end

When you worried sick about your pecker

Being cut, as was the custom, else you don't belong

Or that you would be called names.

When life was simple

Summer was actually the dry season

When folks gather to make pilipig and linubihan

Amid the toc-toc-toc of pounding by the village's

Neither-grass-nor-hay cognoscenti

The product so yummy you could burst eating.

When life was simple

Summer was the time to devise games

Which would be topic A for your essay

Of how you spent your summer vacation

When you pray to the gods for a sack full

Of rubber bands with which to challenge

Clarita the village queen of lastiko.

When life was simple

Summer was building play-house

Which you equip with the best there was

Then momma would say why build one

Does it mean our house doesn't fit you?

Go ahead and never come back

Which of course she did not mean at all.

When life was simple

Summer was the time to play "fiesta"

With ersatz food and priest and a mock

San Pascual Baylon made of talc tin

To play a funeral, with everybody sobbing

To a dead frog which you skewer for effect

All the time fearful of a lightning strike.

When life was simple

Summer meant playing eskwelahan with

Mock teachers and a kill-joy principal and

Mock graduation at full program and

You could not believe with your eyes the

Hundreds of your elders on the watch

Far into the night under gas lamps.

When life was simple

Summer was staging a mock popularity

Contest to select the village queen

Where millions of bottle caps were reckoned

Which you scoured under Tatay Tino's house

Most of the time banging into his stable of

Carabaos icky with dung, but get the caps you must

Else your candidate would become the village rug.