Dust Trees of Manila

They planted trees but forgot their water. Each leaf a wrinkled newspaper clipping from a world I never subscribed to. Noise here is curated. A choir of car horns, a sermon of drills but I hear the silence between footsteps and the echo of one slippered child crossing the pedestrian overpass with rice in a plastic bag. My eyes collect forgotten wrappers, graffiti prayers, the melancholy of sky cut by concrete. They say you must harden in Manila. But I cracked gently, like an eggshell left in heat.