ON POPE FRANCIS’S VISIT TO THE PHILIPPINES/- NONILON V. QUEANO/28January2015/New York

ON POPE FRANCIS’S VISIT TO THE PHILIPPINES

- NONILON V. QUEANO/28January2015/New York

So it comes down to these:

The faith that moves mountains,

Hope eternal.

Shouts of joy and anguish

At sight of the Pope

Wading across the immaculate field,

Through the smithy of our memory of time;

Cries camouflaging pain,

Poverty, perhaps despair,

Rising to prayers for salvation

In symphony

With the palavering masses

From other worlds and far-off places.

We have not seen

An ocean or a conflagration, as it were,

So cosmic and phantasmal,

In a long time:

Praise be the Maker.

And yet we’ve always known

In our hearts,

The music of the stars.

So what is there to fear.

Among the madding crowd,

Where draw the line,

Between the unenlightened,

And the committed;

The oblivious,

And the wide-eyed;

The will-o’-the-wisps,

Fireweeds,

Ayahuascas,

And Jesus’s crown of thorns;

Where lies the fault.

Among all peoples

Struggling to break free,

Dreaming of paradise,

.

So, we are all God’s children,

But left perhaps

To wander around the planet

On our own;

What does it mean

To be catholics or communists,

Or atheists,

Does it matter, indeed,

What faiths we profess,

If the same golden heart abides

And bleeds for the poor and the oppressed.

Though infinite the voices and signs of language,

Wouldn’t everything align

In the presence of this caring, loving heart,

Compassionate, merciful

Defining with such invincibility,

Our common realities, locations, ideologies.

At least, we owe to Pope Francis, the truth.

That for the heartless few:

The greedy, warmongering capitalists,

Imperialists and their minions,

Terrorists and Beelzebubs:

They all will jettison,

Be thrown to the pit,

Where there will be no poetry

Nor music,

But the horrible clucking of tongues,

Shrill, execrable cries

Of eternal suffering,

Monsantuan torment,

Foul smell,

Untold pain,

Fighting and unending discord,

Bodies gangrened and torn apart,

Twisted faces,

Phlegethonian rivers of blood,

And Cocytus and Satan himself

Buried in ice and freezing dead

For all eternity,

In the coldest, coldest, darkest night