The Hill Beyond the Water

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

It rises not suddenly, no—Balaan Bukid—
but slowly, as though memory itself
had taken shape in a hill, in a path lined
with dust and roots and the slow-footed breath
of pilgrims, as though the land were
waiting, always waiting,
for the weight of someone to walk it again.

You ascend—how long?
You do not know. The sea lies behind you,
and across it, the city flares—
steel-limbed and light-ridden,
its windows catching the sun like
snatches of a language you no longer speak,
though once you tried. You tried.

There are towers now in Iloilo.
Tall things. Certain things.
Unquestioning in their rise.
They do not know
of the silence in this place,
the candles melted to their knees
on stone, the rustle of guava leaves
touched only by the wind and the slow
prayers of women who speak
not to be heard
but because they must.

You think—here is a kind of stillness
no architect will ever know.
No city planner will blueprint the rhythm
of soft sandals against rock, or the hush
that follows the fifth mystery of sorrow,
or the girl placing her palm
on the door of the chapel
as if asking permission
to enter not a place
but a memory
she doesn’t yet understand.

You sit beneath a tree,
its bark rough as the hands of your lola
when she peeled kamote with a knife
too small for the task, but always enough.
The leaves cast shadows on your knees
like a page half-written. You do not
write anything down. You listen.

And it is there, in that quiet—
in that place the city cannot reach—
that the lesson reveals itself, not as a sentence,
not even as a thought, but as a presence.
The way the light falls on your skin
without needing to announce itself.
The way the wind remembers your name
when even you have forgotten it.

When you walk back down,
Iloilo gleams across the strait.
So busy. So bright. So sure of itself.
But you know, now,
what it does not—
that something older than ambition
waits just across the water,
and it has no need to rise.

It only needs
to remain.