By: Telly Gonzaga-Ocampo
Flow Gently, Sweet Afton: The Spring We Forgot We Had
“Flow gently, sweet Afton” was the first line of a poem we memorized in high school at St. Joseph College. Miss Luz Ibaya and Ms. Candida Vale would read it aloud, voices soft, letting the words settle like water. Back then, poetry felt far away — an Irish river in a textbook. Today, in the middle of a water shortage, that same line comes back to me. Because our own Afton was here all along. It was the Baliaut Spring.
The poem was about love for language, but it also taught us to love what flows: words, memory, water. Now, as taps run dry I understand why our teachers put such warmth into prose and poetry. They weren’t just teaching Literature. They were teaching us how to notice what sustains us.
When the Taps Went Quiet
Our LGU water works have been running day and night. Still, the complaints are loud. “Incapable,” people say. “No planning.”
The truth is simpler and harder: our underground tank only holds 5 days of consumption. One breakdown leads to another. With pressure dropping, some households had to install pumps just to push water to the second floor.
“Mangadye na lang ta aron makaya sa mga tawo nga nagtrabaho adlaw ug gabii para madali ang solusyon sa problema,” my neighbor said. Pray, so those working day and night can find the solution faster. It’s not just a utility problem. It’s a remembering problem. Because when the pipes go silent, the old places start speaking again.
The Baliaut Spring: Where Water Danced
I went back in my mind to the Baliaut spring of my childhood — our community’s playground and labhanan. It was where spring water and sea water met. Two big talisay trees and a huge pitaog tree stood guard along the bank. At high tide, the water turned salty, perfect for diving and swimming. At ebb tide, the spring water would flow gently.
Tiny waves overlapping. Nagbaha na, we’d call it. In my imagination, that was my “Sweet Afton.” Not in Scotland. But Here.
The trees are gone now, cut down during the road-widening projects in the early 2000s. And when the big trees disappeared, the water also lost its rhythm. It stopped dancing.
What We Lost, What We Can Replant
This is just my tinamban analysis, but I think the water table dropped. Too much pumping, not enough recharge. Not enough trees to hold the rain. That’s why our pumps break down. That’s why the spring runs thin.
We keep looking for engineers, but maybe we also need planters.
It’s about time we plant trees around our watersheds and in our neighborhoods — for shade, for gentler air, for water to find its way back underground.
Cultural heritage isn’t only poems and old songs. It’s also the springs we played in, the trees that lined them, the rituals of fetching water together.
Miss Ibaya and Ms. Vale taught us that Literature lives when we feel it. And I felt “Flow gently, sweet Afton” again this week — not on a page, but in the memory of water moving soft over stone.
Only then can we sing it for real:
Flow gently, sweet Afton.
Until our springs do again.
