Few poems about the past actually take you to a place and let you stand in it. C. V. Wicker's "The Past" opens with a precise address, Paco Cemetery in Manila, and then spends fifteen short lines turning that address into a meditation on how history feels when you are physically close to it. The title promises something abstract; the poem delivers something you can almost smell.
The first stanza is built from plain, sober description. Caskets are "let end-wise into the wall," each claiming "a two-foot square of moss-edged space / In the great stone circle." The details are small and exact, and that exactness is where the poem gets its power. A human life has been reduced to a two-foot square, and the verb "claim" gives those squares an odd dignity, as though each dead person were still staking out a modest piece of property. The moss at the edges quietly introduces time: stone does not grow moss overnight. The circle matters too. It is a closed shape with no obvious beginning or end, and it hints at the poem's larger suggestion that the past is not a line behind us but something that surrounds us.
Then the ylang-ylang trees arrive, and the poem changes pace. The line "With year-long steps parade the centuries" is a clever piece of personification. The trees become a procession, each step lasting a year, and the word "parade" gives the movement a ceremonial, almost military pomp that sits oddly against the stillness of the graves. Then comes the single word "Slow." Alone on its line, it forces the reader to slow down in exactly the way it describes. The poem's rhythm does what its words say.
After that, the sentences tighten and the lines shorten: "Just now / Evening is heavy with their breath." The shift from the vast sweep of centuries to "just now" is the poem's pivot, pulling an enormous span of time into a single evening. The word "heavy" is well chosen, because it makes a scent feel like weather, something pressing on the body. The poem is also generous with sound here. The rhyme of "breath" and "death" is the most noticeable one in the poem, and its placement is the point: the rhyme links the living tree and the dead below it, so that the same word-ending joins breathing to dying. Elsewhere the poem mostly avoids a regular pattern. Lines vary from a single syllable to a long, flowing statement, which gives it the feel of someone thinking aloud as they walk rather than reciting something polished.
The phrase "The dizzying sweetness tastes of death" is the poem's emotional centre, and it is a deliberately uncomfortable line. Sweetness and death are usually kept apart, yet here the senses blur: a smell is "tasted," and pleasure becomes a kind of faint nausea. The perfume of the flowers is beautiful and slightly sickening at the same time, which may be the poem's honest verdict on the past itself. It is lovely to contemplate and impossible to separate from loss.
The ending refuses to explain any of this. Instead of a moral, we get an image: "Waxy-yellow petals are fallen on the ground." The grammar is slightly archaic, "are fallen" rather than "have fallen," which gives the line a quiet, almost biblical finality. It also leaves the petals in a state rather than an action: they are simply down, finished, a settled condition. The color and the word "waxy" are worth noticing, since wax suggests candles and funeral offerings, and the petals look both fresh and artificial, alive and already preserved.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It never announces that the past is powerful, mournful, or inescapable. It gives us a wall of caskets, a slow row of trees, and a smell too sweet to bear, and trusts us to feel the weight of those things ourselves. In doing so it suggests that the past is less something we remember than something we breathe in, evening after evening, without quite being able to name it.