Sunday, February 6, 2011

ANOTHER INVITATION TO THE POPE TO VISIT TONDO (EmManuel TorRes)

ANOTHER INVITATION TO THE POPE TO VISIT TONDO (EmManuel TorRes)
Next time your Holiness slums through our lives,
we will try to make our poverty exemplary.
The best is a typhoon month. It never fails
To find us, like charity, knocking on
all sides of the rough arrangements we thrive in.
Mud shall be plenty for the feet of the pious.

We will show uoi how we pull things together
from nowhere, life after life,
prosper with children, whom you love. To be sure,
we shall have more for you to love.

We will show you where the sun leaks on
our sleep,
on the dailiness of piece meals and wages
with their habit of slipping away
from fists that have holes for pockets.

We will show you our latest child with a sore
that never sleeps. When he cries,
the dogs of the afternoon bark without stopping,
and evening darkens early on the mats.

Stay for supper of turnips on our table
since 1946 swollen with the same hard tears.
The buntings over our one and only window
shall welcome a short breeze.

And lead prayers for the family that starves
and stays together. If we wear roasries round
our nexks
it is not because they never bruise our fingers,
(Pardon if we doze on a dream of Amen.)

But remember to remember to reward us
with something . . . more lush, greener than all
the lawns of memorial parks singing together.
Our eyes shall belss the liveliness of dollars.

Shed no tears, please, for the brown multitudes
who thicken on chance and feast on leftovers
as the burning garbage smuts the sky of Manila
pile after pile after pile.

Fear not. Now there are only surreal assassins
about who dream of your death in the shape
of a flowering kris.


http://www.oocities.com/phil_poetry/menu_poems04.html

5 comments:

  1. When you're chewing on life's gristle
    Don't grumble, give a whistle
    And this'll help things turn out for the best...
    And...always look on the bright side of life...
    Always look on the light side of life.

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  2. Life is like a coin. You can spend it any way you wish, but you only spend it once.

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  3. The goal of life is living in agreement with nature.

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  4. Behind every trial and sorrow that He makes us shoulder, God has a reason.

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  5. WE must be strong in all the trials that will come into our life.

    ReplyDelete