(A tribute to martial law victims in Samar)
Transitions are tricky to handle.

If only a few days after were merely a habit

in storytelling to render the plot more credible.

So that what came first could be understood

as requisite for another to occur. As such, horrifying

stories are easier to make sense of. As when you’re told

by a midlife woman of her story, who at nine

witnessed her parents’ ordeal from a tight sack

into which she was sealed, an inch of the straw weave

she holed out to see how bodies she had known

her young life could die grotesquely, slowly,

apart from the real life she lived in, while suspended

from a tree she had climbed, more times than she could count,

its canopy the flourish of her childhood, her mother

assured of the growing strength in her legs.

Who could tell how days were to be different?

As that day that began with the usual early sunrise

for the meal that brought them around a table

soon to be the site to their torment. The nearing

raucous of men in search of those who sympathize

with ideas sturdier than their guns filled the house

and hours after, cluttered the implements of home.
By midday, stripped naked of her clothes, her mother

had walked around in a circle of madness, forced

to confess to a treason that in their daily hunger

she barely understood, not an inch of her skin

left unscathed. Her abdomen ripped open

when they could no longer take hold of her flesh.

Her blood streaming into unyielding fields.

Her father fainted after hours of beating, a toe severed

from too much pounding of a rifle butt. In between

the wailing were bodies crossing a threshold.
The sun rose with her still in the air, a fruit too heavy

of its own sap, a knowing she would have exchanged

for anything to go back to those days when the hours

faded without fear. When she didn’t have to say

a few days after to tell the story of her life,

when fleeting forgetfulness could be the only reprieve

of years ahead. But such was to be the plot of her story

as with those others she has soon come to learn,

who had hung from a tree, impaled, or maimed.
Of too much pain, one survives

by taking it in parts. So a few days after is easier

on the tongue as it is on the mind. For how

lives could be told as they unfold, ravaged

before our eyes. They are the kindest words

to stall what could pass off as history,

chronicled now behind this lens to discern

how darkness unhinges, in between the sun

setting and rising, in between breathing,

in the flesh ripping apart, in the minds losing

what it could hold, numbed into

what it could wake up to

a few days after