ANOTHER INVITATION TO THE POPE TO VISIT TONDO Emmanuel Torres

I. Text

ANOTHER INVITATION TO THE POPE TO VISIT TONDO

Emmanuel Torres

Next time your Holiness slums through our lives,

we will try to make our poverty exemplary.

The best is a typhoon month. It never fails

To find us, like charity, knocking on

all sides of the rough arrangements we thrive in.

Mud shall be plenty for the feet of the pious.

We will show you how we pull things together

from nowhere, life after life,

prosper with children, whom you love. To be sure,

we shall have more for you to love.

We will show you where the sun leaks on

our sleep,

on the dailiness of piece meals and wages

with their habit of slipping away

from fists that have holes for pockets.

We will show you our latest child with a sore

that never sleeps. When he cries,

the dogs of the afternoon bark without stopping,

and evening darkens early on the mats.

Stay for supper of turnips on our table

since 1946 swollen with the same hard tears.

The buntings over our one and only window

shall welcome a short breeze.

And lead prayers for the family that starves

and stays together. If we wear roasries round

ournexks

it is not because they never bruise our fingers,

(Pardon if we doze on a dream of Amen.)

But remember to remember to reward us

with something . . . more lush, greener than all

the lawns of memorial parks singing together.

Our eyes shall belss the liveliness of dollars.

Shed no tears, please, for the brown multitudes

who thicken on chance and feast on leftovers

as the burning garbage smuts the sky of Manila

pile after pile after pile.

Fear not. Now there are only surreal assassins

about who dream of your death in the shape

of a flowering kris.

II. Background of the Work/Author

Emmanuel Torres is a poet, art critic, professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Ateneo de Manila and curator of its art museum. He was born on April 29, 1932 in Manila. In 1954, he finished his BA in Education and received the Joseph Mulry Award for Literary Excellence at the Ateneo de Manila University, and in 1957, on a Fulbright-Smith-Mundt fellowship, he obtained his M.A. in English at the State University of Iowa where he enjoyed an International Scholarship in Creative Writing and attended Paul Engle's Writers' Workshop. He joined the Ateneo faculty in 1958, and since 1960 was curator of the Ateneo University Art Gallery. In 1961, he was one of Ten Outstanding Young Men (TOYM Awardee for Literature). At the Ateneo, he held the Henry Lee Erwin Chair in Creative Writing and the FEBTC/Jose B. Fernandez Chair for art research. In addition to the extensive local and international recognition he received for his work in the arts and letters, Torres was art columnist in The Manila Times and SIM. He has also been a member of several committees on art exhibits across the globe.