The mother calls her little girl’s name
through the megaphone, hopes that like Lazarus,
the child will arise from the hotel’s debris.
Or that the ruins, the shattered bones
of a concrete leviathan, with their last breath
will cough up her daughter.
I didn’t follow up on the story,
one among many shown on TV news
covering the 1990 earthquake.
More than a thousand deaths in Luzon
mourned across the archipelago
a third of a century ago,
and I shared the grief at age 15.
Then, the blurring of memory.
Then, another staggering tragedy.
Calamities and the mysteries of memory
eclipse one after the other like clockwork.
But today I remember the bullhorned summons,
each unanswered by the newly-formed hill
of grey slabs and twisted steel.
I pray time, to some degree,
has dulled the pain
of the mother’s grief.
But no need to ask as it is time’s holy
(or unholy) charge: excavate knives,
and with each retrieval,
blunter edges.
