A Eulogy of Roaches

A Eulogy of Roaches by Bienvenido Lumbera

Blessed are the cockroaches.

In this country they are

the citizens who last.

They need no police

to promulgate their peace

because they tolerate

each other's smell or greed.

Friends to dark and filth,

they do not choose their meat.

Although they neither sow

nor reap, a daily feast

is laid for them in rooms

and kitchens of their pick.

The roaches do not spin,

and neither do they weave.

But note the russet coat

the sluggards wear: clothed

at birth, roaches require

no roachy charity.

They settle where they wish

and have no rent to pay.

Eviction is a word

quite meaningless to them

who do not have to own

their dingy crack of wall.

Not knowing dearth or taxes,

they increase and multiply.

Survival is assured

even the jobless roach;

his opportunities

pile up where garbage grows.

Dying is brief and cheap

and thus cannot affright.

A whiff of toxic mist,

an agile heel, a stick

-- the swift descent of pain

is also final death.

Their annals may be short,

but when the simple poor

have starved to simple death,

roaches still circulate

in cupboards of the rich,

the strong, the wise, the dead.