The Line is Not Broken

Makabenta folded his tabloid

Lucente laid his satire down beside him.  

The Sanghiran poets shut their magazines 

but Waray kept speaking. 

The page was a thin grave. 

Ink dried.  

Yet a different paper caught the words:  

air, static, the current of DYVL.  

Now the siday moves through antennas,  

into markets, kitchens in the morning.  

The old syllable-counts live in speakers.

The dead wrote for paper that rips.  

We write for wind that carries.  

Tune to Fogtown, to Cancabatoc

while the tower stands, the line is not broken.

Short Biography

Fhen M. won the weekly poetry contest on DYVL radio station on May 2, 2026, with his Waray poem “Bara ha Kasingkasing.” Earlier, on April 26, 2026, he was interviewed by DYNF 91.3 Radyo Kauswagan Teleradyo. He was also interviewed on February 7, 2026, by Bombo Radyo Tacloban, where he shared his thoughts on literature and poetry. He recalls “Basuni” as one of the songs that often played on his grandmother’s radio. A soft, melancholic tune, it filled their home with gentle, lingering notes. In Waray, “basuni” means a splinter lodged deep in the heart, and the song captures the sharp, enduring ache of heartbreak.