Bud Bagsak, May 15

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

By the end of it,
they say the mountain was quiet—
but not the kind of quiet
you pray for.
The kind that hums
after something
has been broken
in half.

The women
were still there—
skirts stiff with smoke,
the weight of their dead
folded into the backs
of their knees.
Children clung
not to their mothers
but to the heat-stung rock,
to the hem of the mountain
that had cradled them
as if it too
had known it would
lose them.

The Americans came
with guns that did not tremble.
General Pershing,
with his pressed uniform
and eyes like cold dishes—
he called it valor,
later,
what they did to the bodies.
He said they died fighting,
which is not the same
as saying
they were killed.

It is not battle
when the earth itself
cannot swallow
the blood fast enough.
It is not a war
when mothers fall
with knives in their palms
and babies still
wrapped
in slings
against their breasts.

I try to imagine
what it felt like—
to choose the mountain,
to climb it
knowing it will be
your last rising.
To hear the jungle
stop singing.
To smell the gunpowder
before it arrives.
To hold your husband’s breath
in your lungs
because his chest
has already emptied.

They said it ended
on May 15.
But grief
does not end.
It roots
in the hollows.
It passes through wombs
and grows quiet
as it waits
for the next name
to carry.

This is not a poem.
It is a body
buried
too fast.