The poem for today is by Richard Jones who totally gets it:

Coming up from the subway
into the cool Manhattan evening,
I feel rough hands on my heart -
women in the market yelling
over rows of tomatoes and peppers,
old men sitting on a stoop playing cards,
cabbies cursing each other with fists
while the music of church bells
sails over the street,
and the father, angry and tired
after working all day,
embracing his little girl,
kissing her,
mi vida, mi corazon,
brushing the hair out of her eyes
so she can see.

What a beautiful day we had today in the Oklahoma panhandle. Warm weather, clear skies and not much wind. The children had a great time hunting for eggs and the two little ones spent almost the entire afternoon playing with a sprinkler contraption. Both girls are now sound asleep.

D-Day is less than 2 months away. My wife and I are so excited. We gave ten years of our lives to Guymon and we intend to give at least ten years back to the Philippines. We hope that with our return, we will be able to prove that it is possible to go back home again with a little downsizing as well as with a serious review/reflection of what truly matters in our lives.

There is an indecent number of " Overseas Filipino Workers" in every part of the world and it may be wishful thinking to hope to get a lot of my countrymen back should the conditions in the Philippines improve sufficiently. But having been an "OFW" these last 17 years convinces me that this is a goal worth fighting for.

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)
THE SNOW GLOBE

A long time ago, when I was a child,
They left my light on while I went to sleep,
As though they would have wanted me beguiled
By brightness if at all; dark was too deep.

And they left me one toy, a village white
With the fresh snow and silently in glass
Frozen forever. But if you shook it,
The snow would rise up in the rounded space

And from the limits of the universe
Snow itself down again. O world of white,
First home of dreams! Now that I have my dead,
I want so cold an emblem to rehearse
How many of them have gone from the world's light,
As I have gone, too, from my snowy bed.

Thomas Merton was a Cistercian monk who wrote this poem for his brother whose plane was shot down and died at sea. Appropriate reflection on a hot April Good Friday.

For My Brother: Reported Missing in Action, 1943

Sweet brother, if I do not sleep
My eyes are flowers for your tomb
And if I cannot eat my bread,
My fasts shall live like willows where you died.
If in the heat I find no water for my thirst
My thirst shall turn to springs for you, poor traveler

Where, in what desolate and smoky country,
Lies your poor body, lost and dead?
And in what landscape of disaster
has your unhappy spirit lost its road?

Come, in my labor find a resting place
And in my sorrows lay your head,
Or rather take my life and blood
And buy yourself a better bed—
Or take my breath and take my death
And buy yourself a better rest.

When all men of war are shot
And flags have fallen into dust,
Your cross and mine shall tell men still
Christ died on each, for both of us.

For in the wreckage of your April Christ lies slain,
And Christ weeps in the ruins of my spring;
The money of Whose tears shall fall
Into your weak and friendless hand,
And buy you back to your own land:
The silence of Whose tears shall fall
Like bells upon your alien tomb.
Hear them and come: they call you home.

This was written by Horacio De La Costa, SJ many years ago and I offer his timeless words amid all the hopelessness:

Jewels of the Pauper

There is a thought that comes to me sometimes (the old captain said) as I sit by my window in the evening, listening to the young men's guitars, and watching the shadows deepen on the long low hills, the hills of my native land.

You know, we are a remarkably poor people: poor, not only in material goods, but even in the riches of the spirit. I doubt whether we can claim to possess a truly national literature. No Shakespeare, no Cervantes has yet been born among us to touch with immortality that in our landscape, in our customs, in our history which is most vital, most original, most ourselves. If we must needs give currency to our thoughts, we are forced to mint them in the coinage of a foreign tongue; for we do not even have a common language.

But as poor as we are, we yet have something. This pauper among the nations of the earth hides two jewels in her rags. One of them is our music. We are sundered one from another by eighty-seven dialects; we are one people when we sing. The kundimans of Bulacan awaken an answering chord in the lutes of Leyte. Somewhere in the rugged north, a peasant woman croons her child to sleep; and the Visayan listening remembers the cane fields of his childhood, and his mother singing the selfsame song.

We are again one people when we pray. This is our other
treasure: our Faith. It gives, somehow, to our little uneventful days a kind of splendor: as though they had been touched by a King. And did you ever notice how they are always mingling, our religion and our music? All the basic rites of human life-the harvest and the seed-time, the wedding, birth and death are among us drenched with the fragrance of incense and the coolness of music.

These are the bonds that bind us together; these are the soul that makes us one. And as long as there remains in these islands one mother to sing Nena's Lullaby, one boat to put out to sea with the immemorial rowing song, one priest to stand at the altar and offer God to God, this nation may be conquered, trampled upon, enslaved, but it cannot perish. Like the sun that dies every evening, it will rise again from the dead.