There Is Something Wrong With This Picture

There Is Something Wrong With This Picture
By Niccolo Rocamora Vitug

I was sent a picture of a funeral
and there's something wrong with it.
The mother is clad in blue and white PPE,
come from jail while people steer clear
of a virus driving thousands into graves.
As the mother stands at the photo's edge,
another woman clasps her hands
as if praying before the body
in a coffin big as two shoe boxes.
She is dressed in fatigue,
the pattern choking the picture–
a swarm of police sent by the state
with boots to trample protest
against the government that let the virus in.
Is it right to write while the atrocity
is sent as picture from one smartphone
to another? What is wrong with this picture,
where a policewoman cannot pray,
where a mother cannot grieve,
where a dying child could not be held
by the mother? I turn my head away
but am called to look again and again.
There is an open wound screaming
there is something wrong with this picture.
A baby died without the mother
because she was jailed for dissent.
These words will not make it right.


A poet living in the Philippines, Niccolo Rocamora Vitug was a finalist of the 2020 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize.

Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, October 16) — Baby River Emmanuel Nasino, the three-month old daughter of detained activist Reina Mae Nasino, was laid to rest on Friday. Until the final minutes of the mother and child's somber reunion, it remained gripped with tension. https://www.cnnphilippines.com/news/2020/10/16/Baby-River-burial-Reina-Mae-Nasino.html