Translation
We thought nothing of it, he says,
though some came so close to where we slept.
I try to see him as a boy,
back in the Philippines, waking
to the sound of machine guns.
His family would spend their morning
spreading a paste over the sores
of the house’ s thick walls.
He tells how he touched
points where bullets entered,
his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes,
as if inside there existed a space
where everything from this world could vanish.