It has Never Rained on the Fiesta de La Naval de Manila
And yet an ominous grumble invokes what has never fallen on the second Sunday of October. At the lanai the Sacred Heart stands in between candles burning in hexed shot glasses; a replica of the Pope’s grey pectoral cross kisses Christ’s feet. By Christ’s right oblate arm the laptop plays the fiesta as it marches into a glum dip; a dip so glum it crackles and begins saying mass. The wireless speaker plucks the sounds ferrying from neighboring Quezon City. The old saints stand solid in the backdrop of the altar. The Virgen del Santisimo Rosario de La Naval de Manila sparkles with her golden ensemble.
The sky contracts its dusty blue into the frame of corrugated roofs and tree branches. A theater opens to a clear distance daubed by the vaporous gloom. It is six in the evening and the afternoon has gone into hiding.
I am walking back to the church, trailing the Virgen and saints in candle light procession and waving a handkerchief and screaming Viva La Virgen! Viva! with thousands until we parted. It never rained. I am sitting here.
The laptop is the brightest presence in the timid lanai. The screen is a rectangle orb asking to be knelt before. Though it is the entity trapped in its frequency doing the asking and the leading. Put simply, it glows before me and my family who are devotees of light. Until only the porch lights of neighbors shone.
The Dominican’s voice sinks under the magnificent gavel-pummel from above. I listen to the homily but find that I always was listening to the thunder. I am quite sure that today La Gran Señora opens her majestic cloak and sweeps the past’s cannon balls that they may not be fired. I hear this and then light bursts open. It has never rained today but it did anyway.
The Bones of Peter
Began the excavation of how
the white fragments turned
into an eternal city
of marble.
Analyses confirm the fragments
belong to a heavy-built
male whose age is a speck
in the years it took to lift
the fact from the grimy bricks
of the abysmal necropolis.
The ossuary is a reliquary.
The (re)build of a fisherman.
The fragments, bases
for this expanse of heaven,
its reign over the earth.
The carpals were, however, not seen,
for a long time,
holding the keys.
For reasons renown,
a crypt is cryptic.
Began a million suppositions.
Under the Basilica, a wall had
to be broken
for the confirmation
to be made.
What archaeologists found:
Shards, fractured
memorials
preserved by dusted purple
sheets.
To suppose
this is royalty.
To suppose
this is longing.
To suppose
this is suffering.
To suppose
this is clothing.
To suppose
this is a sign
like the visions
of the man in question
of animals
sacrilegious to eat.
It was that the sacred
brought impure bones, after
years of imperial disaster,
on a hidden night
of uncovering.
To open these suppositions
and discover pieces of one
who broke upon a threefold
cackle of a rooster.
That ancient confirmation,
dry marrow creep of abandonment.
This sprawling stretch
of dead we want to bring back.
