Rice Terraces, Northern Luzon

The village kids here in summer

are the essence of idle beauty—

racing worn-out tires uphill or strumming

the same few songs from a doorway

under cover of the afternoon rains.

And for the second straight day

the builders have fallen asleep

inside the narrow shade

of the half-finished home

overlooking the valley.

From this distance, America

is a joke at which we

would each laugh if not

for the heat. Only what they’re building

is a larger inn for when the road

is complete. Progress

riding in smugly on its dumb

white horse. I know

that I am no one to lecture

on need, that my being here

where a woman works alone,

preparing the harvest of this year’s seed.

Let them finish the road.

The soul cares nothing for that.

It grows in the dark mud,

it crests stubbornly

each spring—I never understood

what labor it was, what release—

pounding away at the husk,

winnowing the grain.