Joanna C. Scott

…Manila, the eighties _______ Under dawn-bursting mangoes, skies dropping starfruit, _______lean palms slung with orchids like Christmas streamers in a child’s nursery, beside a glazed pool to which frogs _______and thin snakes fled during typhoons and were trapped there next day by two yipping spaniels skidding this way and that _______on tiling reflective as mirrors,

(Philippine Refugee Processing Center, Bataan, 1985, since destroyed in the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo) . . . for Roel, my driver He would squat in the shade All day beside a hulk Hoisted off some beach Where boat people had run Aground. Brushing away Children from the local Village come to beg, he Would gossip