ANOTHER POEM

A SOBERING LIGHT

(remembering my son Oswald’s day of birth/death 21 years ago)

Twenty-seven January, nineteen eighty eight
When you almost saw the light.
(But of course I won’t ever know if you really did.
This is the most I could surmise:

Perhaps you had a faint glimpse of it.)
Then the wings of death engulfed your being
And darkness dominated the landscape
Of a clear morning that later developed
Into a sunny noon of frustrated celebration.
And I was lonely beyond loneliness.

The day couldn’t be in control of the moment;
I was in control as tears melted the heat of the sun
And darkness ruled the light of day.
(Or was there really light? Would a man in anguish know?)
I wobbly stood before the unfathomable apeiron—
Facing the hub of a never-ending vortex—
That almost stole the sanity of my consciousness
For no wailing was ever heard in the wilderness of deaf
And nonresponsive deities who are always on a holiday.

Yet restore sobriety I must with the realization
That life must go on even with the chronic grief
That has gripped the unconsolable heart
Of a father who never felt the warmth of your embrace
At every high noon of joy and at every dusk of difficulties.
But like a sobering light that encourages life
To be more meaningful and daring in an exigent cosmos,
The memory of you, my Son who never knew me,
Will be an enduring inspiration that defies the sting of death.

Ruel F. Pepa
27 January 2009

A POEM

Trailblazing from the Dead-end
(In An Age When God is in Hiding)

Ruel F. Pepa

The drama has worsened from corny to nauseating. The deity
who has claimed the earth and everything in it is his[1] is absent—contrary to his claim of omnipresence—in the midst of folly
and irresponsibility pulled off by the very humanity he appointed
to be the stewards thereof [2]

How dare has this so-called omniscient Lord God
of Judaeo-Christian mold bestowed such a colossal obligation
to humanity whose limitations and tendencies
he at the very beginning knew very well.

And now, what we find on Earth are myriad forms
of human-made chaos and devastations that in some instances
have now advanced close to annihilation.

Does the Judaeo-Christian claim that “The earth is the Lord’s
and all that is in it” still make sense or are those words
simply an expression of the past wistfulness of a deity
in his megalomaniac illusion?

Obviously, this deity has given up all his claims of omnipotence
and what he has decided to do is simply to escape elsewhere
and disappear from a world whose morality has gone awry:

Heinous crimes, ethnic-cleansing wars, massive environmental degradation in various forms, alarming poverty, severe famine, disturbing economic exploitations and other blatant appearances of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity.

[1] Psalm 24:1

[2] Gen. 1:26b, 28