Francisco R. Albano

I went around
Looking for carnations.
I couldn’t find any.
...

In the beginning
Before beginnings
God said
Let there be light
...

(After Mategna’s “Night”)


Claim this night,
...

His mountains design flight of earth
Rise of self to the top
Where word and silence stop
The inner eye seeing
...

On her natal day, September 25,2011

May you always be
God's masterpiece of art
...

A footnote to Levinas (12January06—25December95)

Unto his image
Unto the image and likeness
...

In memory of Sr. Asuncion C. Martinez, ICM,84
+ July 21,1994
...

All the streets lead to the sacred temple
Built by the town’s flesh and bones,
Its spirit, the blood of life freely given.
The secret is tabernacled here
...

Attention! Know all by these presents:

This afternoon the regional consular office
Gave me a passport good for five years,
...

Our truth,
Our way,
Our life,
Be always the Risen Lord.
...

How do a mango tree and a bodhi tree
Become One?
The story is told
Of a typhoon venting fury on the City,
...

It is the idiom of parable
Spells the difference between stranger
And citizen, a language of time here,
Mere curiosity for those passing through.
...

Everything is as it was in his beginning,
And distance from him was no excuse for change.
Even the dead are alive in the living,
Knowing his return to his fathers’ rain and sun.
...

He returns to these graves to see
Time and timelessness kiss epitaphs
Of non-being and feel the touch of presences
Alive with the warmth of recognition.
...

In memoriam:
Mama Crescenta Rojas Albano,89

Not in this anointed urn before me are you, Mama;
...

I lift this poem to the Lord and his people in gratitude
For grace of freedom greater than whatever I had before –

Greater freedom:
...

By violence signed and washed clean like grace,
I have awakened to light revealing names and stations
where an Adam lived in innocent nakedness
stricken with the throbbing grandeur of a paradise.
...

I could tell that it was mine
just by its tail teasing me in the wind.
My fingers were clumsy, perhaps,
without the power of this stranger's
...

When I got up, to no alarm,
The child was already awake.
Herald of future before the sun
He greeted me.
...

Like a solitary jewel set on green velvet
She sits on rock, her hands on her knees,
Her face cupped in her hands. In the garden-
Sanctuary of Notre Dame, she just is.
...