Why My Father Does Not Eat Camote Poem by Cheryl L. DaytecYañgot

Like clockwork, the green fields transmogrified
Into harvest shining like gold same time each year
Bowls were filled to need (Greed was unthinkable)
Then came trespassers whose ways were strange
Bombs scattered terror; freedom ran to the fringes
Rice fields primed for plenitude became fallows

Routine was shattered; hunger, once a myth, reigned
But resilience can perforate the most solid rock
Inside the parched earth too petrified to nourish life
Camote flourished, a rush of flood drowning despair
They who were listlessly drifting to the end of days
Retraced their gaits, eager to live, to look ahead.

They ate camote
for breakfast
for lunch
for supper
Until the bombs stopped

Out of the caves, an uncircumcised lad emerged a man
Desperate to forget the horrors dripping from war’s fangs
But they are always, always playing even in his aged mind.