The Benguet Road

(1900-1905)

What did it take to turn
      puny horse trails into a road
             cutting through the Bued river
and up raw mountainsides, make 
      rock surrender to pickaxe, dynamite, 
             brute force? In unyielding rain,
soldiers' boots filled with mud.
      When scaffolds snapped, they and native
             laborers tumbled over the cliffs,
disappearing into a green but forlorn silence.
      In this land now the empire's new
             possession, what was it they signed up 
for, here so far away from their fathers' 
      farms in the midwest, the jobs turned down 
             at the glassworks factory in Poughkeepsie? 
Promise of a cool Eden in the northern pastures,
      a map drawn on top of existing landscape.
             Commerce arriving after dispossession.