Petitions

We drove one day years ago 
to La Trinidad, where a near-toothless 
woman who could see the future lived, 
surrounded by farmyard— heads 
of cabbage and cauliflower, bean rows, 
creeping vines of sweet potato on one side 
of the house where tin washbasins leaning 
against the wall reflected the sun’s rays 
like the two giant radars on Mirador Hill, 
built in 1900 and used for weather 
observation and typhoon forecasting. 

The clairvoyant did not take 
money for payment, only accepting 
a bag of groceries or bottles of cerveza 
which we put into her leathered hands 
before being ushered into her kitchen. 
I don’t know what things my mother wanted 
to learn about the days or years ahead, but 
she was told barren women had gone to seek 
advice and months later, conceived a child. 

For other less pressing needs like fair 
weather, no rain for important occasions, 
it was the nuns we went to, in their Convent 
of Perpetual Adoration. We wrote our petitions 
on little slips of paper then slid them through 
a window with a grille, along with a carton of eggs. 
The eggs were no longer warm from the hen, but 
they were speckled and brown and each could fit 
and be carried in the palm of your hand, 
then broken carefully on the rim of a bowl 
so the good sisters could bake bread.  

What I learned was this: we trust 
in whoever is willing to listen. Everyone 
and everything prays for something— the soil 
for rain, fruit for sun, vines for something 
to cling to. My mother for the body's doors to open 
or close in certain ways. When we kneel and 
offer what we can, it means the future can 
still be placated, can still somehow be known 
though nothing about our days seems to change.