a poem by Roger B. Rueda
Leoncio—
dust thick on my boots,
gunlight still flickering
behind my eyelids.
You wrote Mawab
like it was a place,
but you and I both know
it’s a wound
that pretends to be a town.
You gave me a name, Peping,
but no absolution.
I carried that rifle,
my fingers still warm
from touching her—
Nenang, with her river-washed hair,
her silence thicker
than the jungle,
her hands peeling camote
like it was a ritual
against grief.
I held her
the way a man
holds onto something
he knows will disappear.
You gave me that,
and then you took her away.
You think war makes men hard.
But it makes us
mushy inside,
full of pulp and apology
and the kind of guilt
that keeps you
from sleeping
even when the crickets
have forgiven you.
I didn’t want to return.
But you pushed me,
made me walk again
on that cracked earth,
where the blood’s already been
soaked in
too many times
to tell who it belonged to.
You could’ve let me die
like the others—
fast, forgettable,
a shadow swallowed
by gunpowder.
But no.
You made me remember.
You made me carry
the weight
of one woman’s laughter
and an entire mountain
of silence.
You made me ache
with memory,
which is worse
than dying, Leoncio.
Because now,
even in peace,
I cannot forget
how war
taught me to love—
and how love
left me with
no one
to come back to.
No comments:
Post a Comment