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Philippines Graphic Reader
Reflections on the Void
I’ll begin with a crude reduction of La Bruyere’s opening paragraph from Les Characteres: Nothing here is meant to be the first of its kind. This thing itself is a pale and conflated imitation of what I found most resonant in the aphorisms...
Stranger
You had been here
You had come wading to shore
Wearing a raiment of corals and sea grass
And flotsam surrendered by the sea
You had been in this valley
Where you let grow
Cathedral trees laden
With words that fall and flow
On the riverine channels of my mind
You had...
The Backroom Angels Bugaloo
No one, least of all her schoolmates at St. Celestina’s Academy, would have pictured Chona Laon Badoy as the Mayor of San Semilla in Negros Occidental. Chona herself had never aspired for political office, but only to public service, as her in-laws loftily...
Tears for Sparta
Sparta, thank youfor being my faithful friendI am not your masterYou are my teacherFor you taught me to smilewhen inexplicable sorrows came byYou are my St. Michael
when a stranger jumped in our backyardnot to pick flowersbut in our house visited.I promise not to...
The Birth of Zaroasther
They connived with the dark shadows, the family who lived in a house full of glass windows and graven saints. Toraja invited me to their family dinner in Baguio City to commemorate their matriarch’s third death anniversary. That morning, five black pigs were...
Rush Hour
How’s life, old buddy
Between seventy and eighty,
eighty and ninety
Perpetually in a hurry
Heading for the cemetery
Amid emotional poverty
Are we racing against time
Or the lack of it
As tiny seconds tick away
Tick and click
Click and tick
I miss every beat
Talk of rush hours
Caught and missed
Then missed again
Everything’s...
