What the Web Remembers

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Merlie,
I have walked the length of exile,
and silence has become a familiar companion—
but never like this.

You speak of the Spiderwoman
as if she were every motherland
forgotten behind the curtains of empire,
every Filipina
who spun herself into obscurity
so the world might pass by
without further wounding her.

I see her,
in your poem,
behind veiled glass,
watching slender boys
and golden-skinned girls
drink in the sunlight
as though freedom were permanent.
She waits—
not in bitterness,
but in a silence
that accumulates like ash
at the foot of burning pyres.

I know this waiting, Merlie.
I know what it means
to shrink daily,
to become “almost invisible,”
to be called traitor by one’s own countrymen
for loving the country too much.
What you name as “fuzz on skin”
and “eyes that multiply”
—I knew it as vigilance.
The kind one learns
in the shadow of a firing squad,
or in the calm terror
of a prison cell in Fort Santiago.

But yours—
yours is a woman’s waiting,
ancient and venomous,
sweet and fatal.
You do not mourn time,
you distill it.
You say: I practice a patience
vaster than ten worlds.
How can I not bow
before such mercy disguised as threat?

And when you speak
of cicadas returning,
of June greening again—
I hear my own hopes
for a country reborn.
Not through war,
but through remembrance.
Through touch.

When your shadow crosses my door,
you write,
come, take my hand.

Ah, Merlie—
that line wounds me.
Because that is what we ask,
isn’t it?
Those of us
who have been misunderstood,
exiled, silenced,
or mythologized into stillness.
We don’t ask to be explained.
We ask to be met.
To be touched.
To be brought back
from the border between idea
and flesh.

You’ve built a room of silk and memory—
a web that frightens
because it remembers too much.
And yet,
you leave the door open.

That, to me,
is the most radical thing of all.