Hawakan Mo Ang Aking Kamay  (Hold My Hand) – revised for 4/4/14 (written 11/19/13)

About the experience of hopelessness many of us felt last November – 2013 – when hearing about the Typhoon Yolanda / Haiyan approaching, then hitting, the Philippines.

 

to be held        the most cardinal craving

a cord, cut long ago

           

hawakan mo ako

 

I wonder how you hold up

while we fall apart

you our soul-twins

bound by an umbilical cord

no, it was never cut

 

hawakan mo

 

I behold photos of the wreckage

as you

hold shirts over your noses

and bandages over wounds

and hunger in your belly

and the memories of faces

and living rooms and beds

and the taste of her adobo

and the smell of sampaguita

and hope for the missing

and patience as you wait

 

plastic bags embrace

the corpses of the dead

 

while you piece the day together

reassemble the night

 

 

hawakan mo ako

 

 

maybe there is something we hold

across the seas

reaching - through our eyes

our witness

the candor of belief

 

but somehow it is you holding me

even as           each day     you fall through my fingers.