A scarecrow in an empty field.

The Witness

by April Pagaling

(in reply to “Wala Nang Tao sa Sta. Filomena”)

You stand in the stubbled field,
a scarecrow stripped of its purpose,
shirt faded to the hue of stillborn harvests.
January light knifes sideways,
spilling shadows longer than your body,  
stretching beyond the moment  
of its making.

I have witnessed this scene before.
Escalante’s fencepost scarecrow
draped in a dead man’s shirt, arms splayed.
Lupao’s specter stitched from a soldier’s
uniform, standing guard over a garden of graves.
Some posts remain forever manned.

Like old women in black who still sweep
their doorways, or the postman
awaiting letters to places erased from maps.
you mark this plot where something
once took root.

What remains to protect
when everything is gone?
Ask the mothers who still set plates
for children who will not return.
Ask the empty churches,
the abandoned checkpoints,
the borders that persist in memory
long after the maps are redrawn.

Ask my own hands, grasping at these words
as if poetry could preserve
all that we cannot keep,
the hollow art of the heart,
when everything ends
in splinters and silence,
yet still we stand,
like sentinels in the field,
to witness.

-Stafford Challenge 2025

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