In the quiet town of Balangiga, where the sea wind drifts through palm and flame tree,
three bells once hung in a belfry, brushed by salt and sun.
They were not merely metal, but memory made solid,
each toll a breath of devotion,
each peal a summoning of faith.

For generations, their sound carried across the fields,
calling the faithful to prayer,
marking birth and mourning,
weaving sacred rhythm into the fabric of village life.
Their voices, full and bright,
were the heartbeat of the town.

But in 1901, the morning broke with smoke and gunfire.
Balangiga was torn open by war.
The bells, meant to call for peace, rang in alarm,
their final cry before silence.
American soldiers, after the clash, took them away,
trophies of conquest,
stripped from the church that raised them.

In foreign places they slept,
mute and displaced,
while back home, people remembered.
They whispered stories to their children,
lit candles,
spoke the bells’ names like prayers.

Time moved on.
Governments changed,
centuries turned.
But the yearning never dulled.
The call for return
grew stronger than the silence.

And then,
after more than a hundred seasons,
the bells came home.
Crated, carried, and received
not as relics,
but as kin long lost.

They rose again above Balangiga,
not as spoils,
but as symbols,
of resilience, of dignity,
of a nation’s long memory.

Now, when they ring,
they speak not just of the past,
but of a people who refused to forget.
They sing of unity,
of faith restored,
and of the unbroken spirit
that welcomed them home.

Dane Isagani Amoncio

Dane Isagani Amonciocurrently serves as Supervising Legislative Staff Officer II for the Committee on Basic Education and Culture at the House of Representatives. He is pursuing a Doctor of Philosophy in Political Science at the University of the Philippines Diliman. He was awarded Third Prize in the Teleplay category at the 1999 Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, and was a poetry fellow at the 2001 Iligan National Writers Workshop.