Aftermath Poem by Cheryl L. DaytecYañgot

Where tall trees used to stand to give shade to weary travelers, deep holes gape, as if taunting. An angry testimony to the typhoon’s power to destroy life. Wreckages of human civilization are scattered on abandoned streets, or gliding through canals clogged by human rejects of miscellaneous colors and sizes. What would have been a plenteous yield is totally submerged in water. Not a head of cabbage is shown mercy to - a callous indifference to the sweat that nourished the wide land, and the mortgage that may soon snatch it. The children must skip a full academic year – education is a casualty, too. No more new jackets to defeat the fast arriving December winds. Warmth becomes luxury. What, save love, does not?

Somewhere families grieve over human corpses – drowned or hit or buried by falling debris. In the highlands, an eight year-old girl falls off a creek. A boy hears someone crying, “Mama! ” Two days later, a girl’s lifeless body would drift on a lowland river. My mother imagines that she drowned right after her fall.

“Truckloads of cheap canned sardines and packed noodles are on their way.” So says the television broadcaster with a distinctly huge nose. Hungry mouths water, and innocent children rejoice at the piece of good news, amidst a somber environment. But in midstream, as in the past - for history is but a repeat of the plots with different actors and backdrops- the trucks will change course; sardines and noodles will be squirreled in depots of them who elevated audacity to the level of gut to swallow morsel meant for the damned. The air is thick with a cacophony of wails from the orphaned, the homeless, the wretched. Does it ring in the ears of bleeding hearts? Does it nudge the conscience of the blessed?

The fork-tongued leaders of the land promise recovery. Nobody who should listen hears them. For there they are - down on their knees, arms outstretched, agitated fingers caressing rosary beads, repeating chants, entreating the heavens for salvation.

At this point in its wake, the typhoon is tagged as the carnage mastermind. After all, a face or a name has
to be responsible for the stench of human corpses, the harvest nipped in the bud, the homes whose relics now float on foul-smelling, murky rivers and creeks.

Nobody seems to see the large human hands behind.