Bud Bagsak

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

They say the mountain was shaped like a mother
curling herself over her children,
her ribs the ridges of Bud Bagsak,
and the sky,
wide and brutal, was the final witness.

I imagine the women,
their fingers still red from the morning meal,
pressing their bodies against the mountain rock—
not to hide, but to hold.
Not to run,
but to remember what earth feels like
when it hasn’t yet tasted
the blood of your son.

The children were there, too—
barefoot,
carrying no weapons,
only the smell of their mother’s sweat,
and the rhythm of drums
they would never again hear
as music.

The Americans came
not like monsters,
but like men
with names and photographs
in their breast pockets,
shouting orders in a tongue
that sounded like metal
clanging against flesh.

And General Pershing—
his boots still polished
as he stood
on the bones of a language
he did not care to translate.

They called it a battle.
But a battle implies
an evenness,
a fairness of ruin.

This was a hush
before a throat is cut.
This was a mother
watching her daughter
become a sound she will never
learn to unhear.

The mountain did not speak,
but it remembered.
The smoke rose
as if mourning could rise too,
as if loss could find a way
to escape the belly.

I write this now
from a desk,
my hands clean,
my breath even.
But my chest
has begun to ache
with the weight
of their last names
that never made it
into textbooks,
their bodies folded
into the hill,
as if they belonged to it
even in death.

They say it was over by May 15.
But I know the sound of it—
the sound of someone trying
to carry the last word
of their mother
in their mouth
as the rifle lifts.

That does not end.
That keeps going.