Born in Batangas, Philippines, Romalyn Ante is the first East-Asian to win the Poetry London Clore Prize(2018) as well as the Manchester Poetry Prize (2017). Her debut pamphlet, Rice & Rain (V. Press), received the 2018 Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet.
Romalyn was 16 when her mother – a nurse in the NHS – brought the family to Britain. She is a registered nurse and psychotherapist.
Her poem Invisible Women talks about the ubiquity of Filipino women nurses yet who remain in the periphery at the workplace. It forms part of her debut collection, Antiemetic for Homesickness, recently published by Chatto & Windus. Order your copy here. Thanks to Manong George for the Youtube video.
You see them everywhere, these invisible women - one navigates the ache of a corridor and the hour glints with a salvo of needles. A steel intubating stylet enters a mouth like a forced prayer. On the news, an invisible woman fell asleep on the steering wheel and somersaulted into daybreak - debris glittering across the motorway. A splinter buries deeper - she speaks to her patient about his petunias but doesn't mention the blooms of tumours on his endoscopy scan. They are everywhere, though some hazier than others. Flick through their passports to find only a page - their names and countries erased by sun rays. These invisible women, goddesses of caring and tending, but no one hears when their skulls pound like coconut shells about to crack. My mother walks to work when the sky is black and comes out from work when the sky is black, her footsteps leave a snowdrop-studded path. In the middle of a plaza, she pauses - the downpour tricking her eyes to believe the statue in the square is a fellow invisible woman. Once, my mother cut through the blurred backs of men towards a gasping child, and found a blade of grass fluttering in his throat. The air opened and she was gone.
