Maundy, Not Holy

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

It is not enough
to call the day holy—too clean
a word, too bleached in its vowels.

The kind of day this is
wore its edges dark
with oil and sweat.
In our church in Tiwi, the women
laid the linen out like a body
had just risen from it.
Someone cut the bread
with fingers still smelling
of garlic and soap.

It was Maundy, not holy.
Maundy, from mandatum,
the new commandment
spoken in the low
light of supper—love one another—
not like poetry,
but like a wound
you choose to carry.

He rose from the table
and knelt—not before God,
but before the feet of men
with calluses like shell—
washed them
with the care
you’d give to a fruit
too ripe,
as if love was not belief
but the act of dipping
your hands
into someone else’s dirt.

I think of my lola,
the way she wiped my knees
with coconut oil
when I fell outside the sari-sari,
how her silence
was its own kind of liturgy.

We forget that Maundy
was not a feast
but a lesson.
That bread wasn’t broken
for blessing,
but for sharing.
That the basin was not ceremonial,
but full of the cold water
from the clay tap
in the corner of the yard.

That he stooped—
not as symbol,
but because we had forgotten
how to do it for each other.

Maundy is the ache
of a back bent too long
without complaint.
The crackle
of fish skin on fire
at dusk.
The half-light
of a house that knows
it is always the last supper.

Call it holy,
and you forget the blood
beneath the nail.
Call it Maundy,
and you remember
he knelt first—
then said,
now you.