Blocks

The TV flashes a face of fluctuating hues
as lassitude fills your eyes.
This has been your escape from days
of discomfort: settling on the sofa,
submitting yourself to Nintendo.
It is entertaining as I watch

your fingers dance in confusion
on the control pad, fulfilling your every
strategy. Much more fascinating than the graphics
and sounds of this diversion you play. I enjoy
your complacency found in no-new technology.
But sometimes even the game causes you

preoccupation. And so I intervene:
“Place it here, move it there, rotate a little more...”
Then we both smile slyly as we witness
the mass of blocks on the screen
gradually collapse.

How I wish reality were as easy.

(For Rowena, my mother)

Blink

Stone eyes

that see beyond the deadpan faces
fixed on the Bread held up high,

whose color and texture is that of
bones buried in the muddied
form of muck made after last week’s
downpour has crumbled earth;

whose stillness on Sabbath
mirrors the unspoken stories that came
before the storm, those that befell without witnesses,
in the corners of this barrio
only lighted by makeshift street lamps, within
the dark shade of trees, the soft walls of shacks

whose owner has multiplied grace
for mouths gaping on hunger’s account,
has taught altruism in a lesson of wood
and nails, is the Word

became flesh; blink.

And the people turn into salt.