Banza Church Ruins

by Prince Marlo Delicano Montadas

The baleté tree embraces

the palace of limestones and corals.

The bell tower remembers

none of the sound its bell once called.

It could not keep up with

the passage of time as it used to.

It is a child, left standing,

whose vocabulary of separation

knows only abandonment.

So, the tree enshrouds the tower

with her hanging roots like a mother

wrapping her child in her warmth.

Nature nurtures what the lives

it had nourished left behind and forgot.

They listen to the humming

of a pump boat cruising along the river,

and await the return of the children all day,

who stare at the chipped inscribed stone,

and unearth the existence of a Bible

abiding in the verdant hollow—

inside the bell tower,

inside the baleté tree.