Honoring José Rizal
No hubo mañana
Compuso a luz vacilante de lámpara
Su mayor poesía en catorce estrofas,
De cinco líneas cada una, en tropel,
Sobre un pequeño trozo de papel.
Lo que rastreaba su pluma mordaz
Apenas cabía en el, de no ser estrujadas.
Escribió su gran remate en minúsculas,
Cual en su candente corazón eran mayúsculas.
Ilustrados, como el, pedían derechos legítimos.
Aspiraban todos en ser verdaderos ciudadanos.
Luego que su “Noli” en Alemania se imprimió,
Su carácter de libre pensador manifestó.
Los jesuitas de su querido Ateneo de Manila
Donde, de niño y mozo pasó años felices,
Después veían en el un hombre de gran cuidado.
Estaban seguros que iba a parar en un cadalso.
Gemía la amargura reinando en su país idolatrada.
Años atrás a un amigo había escrito:
“Si España Necesita el holocausto de mi vida, pues,
¿Para que quiero la vida si la patria es antes?”
No le quedaba tiempo para otro día
Aquella triste noche de su vida.
A la aurora, en la Luneta, soldados nativos
Cumplirían su pena de muerte con balazos.
En un escondite de la lámpara, ocultó el papel
Repleto de su escritura. Su fe en Dios allí afirma.
Cuando ya en su tumba yacía el filibustero,
Su Último Adiós salió al mundo, indómito!
There was no tomorrow
By flickering lamplight,
He composed his greatest poem
In fourteen stanzas, five lines each,
Tumbling down on a small piece of paper.
What his biting pen traced barely fit on it
Unless squeezed in. He wrote his grand finale
In lower case though in his burning heart
They all seemed capitalized.
Enlightened men, like him,
Demanded legitimate rights. They all aspired to be
true citizens.
After his “Noli” was printed in Germany,
His free-thinking character manifested.
The Jesuits of his beloved Ateneo de Manila,
Where he spent happy years as a child and as a young man,
Later saw him as someone of great concern.
They were sure he would end up on a scaffold.
He moaned the bitterness reigning in his idolized country.
Years before, he had written a friend:
“If Spain needs the holocaust of my life, then
What do I want life for if my homeland comes first?”
He had no time for another day
That sad night of his life.
At dawn, in the Luneta,
Native soldiers would carry out
His death sentence with bullets.
In a hiding nook of the lamp, he concealed
The paper filled with his writing.
His faith in God is affirmed there.
When already in his tomb,
His Last Farewell went out into the world, untamed!
- Latest
- Trending
