The Cross at Balaan Bukid

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

They said it happened
at three in the afternoon—
that hour when the hill hushes
under the sun’s heavy hand,
when even the fire tree near the seventh station
holds its petals,
and the banana vendor
at the base of Balaan Bukid
starts folding his cloth,
his voice now only a murmur
to no one in particular.

You have climbed that hill.
Not once, but every Holy Week
since you could walk without holding
your lola’s hand.
She used to wrap your feet
in old shirts torn into rags
because you couldn’t afford tsinelas.
You carried boiled eggs in a tin pail,
and on your back
the quiet weight
of not knowing
why this mattered—only that it did.

They say the cross
is where eternity meets dirt.
O’Connor called it
the intersection of the timeless
with time.
But to you, it is just
an old wooden post
leaning near the chapel,
blackened by candle smoke,
draped with limp white cloth
and plastic flowers
sun-bleached to gray.

Jesus does not shine.
His arms stretch,
tied like sugarcane bundles
hauled from Hoskyn
in harvest months.
His face looks down,
not in peace—
but in something like exhaustion.

No thunder.
Just the steady hum
of the fan in the chapel.
A woman beside you
presses a rosary to her lips,
her other hand trembling
over a candle
that will not stay lit.

Still—
still something breaks.
You feel it in your knees
as they press
against the cold tile,
in the way the wind
climbs the hill slower this year,
as if it, too,
were remembering.

You don’t understand it.
You don’t try to.
But something in you
opens anyway,
like a guava split by sun.

You remember what Rizal said—
“There are no tyrants
where there are no slaves.”
And suddenly you see it:
Christ was not punished
for being holy.
He was punished
for standing straight
before the crooked.

Here, on this hill in Jordan,
with your palms still sticky
from touching wax,
with your breath shallow
from the climb,
you understand
that the cross
is not a monument.

It is a mirror.
It waits for you
to ask what you’ve
been afraid to say.
It does not shine.
It does not speak.
But it listens.

And that
is enough.