Philippines Graphic Reader

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...