What does it say that we come from an ocean
people, surrounded by water, and none of us
really knows how to swim? I know how to not
drown, but can’t swing a stroke, only paddle.
A dog fetching my breath further and further
from my hot mouth. And what of floating on 
the surface? Age has made me increasingly 
sick on the ocean more than once—what 
would my ancestors make of my weakness, 
my inability to hold the horizon’s movements 
in balance, this propensity for vertigo? Bakit, 
anak? I have no answer for how we travelled 
so far there’s no going back. I am a landlubber, 
a child of cars driving past acres of corn and tobacco.
I walk through fields of wheat, rippling a golden sea.