Missioning and Believing, Ex-Future Act

(For Ariel Tabag, for keeping the faith)



The chasm is clear like crystal.

Or hazy like incense in the censer

As we imagine in refectories unreal

With hunger and panic for not recalling

The aroma of food or blessing.

The lauds and vespers are not any longer

The same as they were in Sauyo,

Or the other sites for your worship

As in your private prayer,



The psalmic prayer that rises with the bright sun,

Or suns as you wish,

Those that go

With our committing our Gregorian chanting

With a cause,

Or The Cause with our youthful chanting

Like the days of old

In the Our Lady of the Angels,

In the fields and beyond the fields,

In your isolation and in the crowd

Of many entrances and exits

For solitaries, or clausuras for the elect.

There, in histories only the 70s know,

Or if you unearth the martyrdom of the 60s,

These were difficult times, the hard ones

If you care to remember, the times of terror

For the believer who knew

For the believer who knew better.



The word was commitment, the same ardor

You put on you verse, the one you conjugate

With love and daring and boldness to write

The poems of our loving and daring and caring.

Or missioning in a new light, ex-future act.

Or believing in an old light, ex-future act.



Sta. Teresita's poetic vision beckons

As the aroused altar

Of the dead and living God

Of the dead and living Christ

Of the dead and dying compassion we look for

In moldy pews, in the antiquity of moralities

Both official and otherwise, like the moralities

In justice and action we have lost

In genuflecting and meditating we have not done for years

In going away to a monastic site in Davila

The remorseless retreat of the Franciscans the original,

The Capuchins that see salvation another way

And the Conventuals that see seasons changing.



Perhaps you still remember the sad site

On the Ilocos shores so long

We cannot see the edges

Of sin and temptation, reason and faith

Of offering ourselves for the mysteries of light

To come and unite with us.





Aurelio S. Agcaoili

Nov. 28, 2004