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EASTER HOMILY

By Jason Montana

 

Open your eyes to the power of the people and the

arms they bear

Of sacrament and gun and a story living in their

hearts.

How different is the violence of the ruling classes and

their foreign masters

In their social system of exploitation and oppression!

The people’s war is violence of symbol and war:

Of seed sprouting from crushing rock and earth;

Of sun pushing out a sky full of dead stars;

Of mother and child struggling against the darkness of

wombs.

It is of Yahweh confirming the nothingness of evil and

death

When he stunned the precision and finality of his

sunrises,

And his mighty wind raised the Son of Man from the

dead.

Rehearsals of revolution are these deeds of sun and seed

and human birth,

And of Jesus glorious from the tomb, above all.

A great story is told, of driving force, and the people

rise!

——–

The poet wrote this piece as a member of the New People’s Army. Prior to joining the NPA, Fr. Paco Albano was a Benedictine priest who co-founded the underground Christians for National Liberation (CNL) that organized church peoples against Ferdinand Marcos’s tyrannical Martial Law and to wage the National Democratic Revolution. After many years in the underground, he resumed his priestly duties and died a priest of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Ilagan (Isabela Province) until his death earlier this month.

 “EASTER HOMILY” is part of the poet’s book “Clearing: Poems of People’s Struggles in Northern Luzon” published by the Artista at Manunulat ng Sambayanan, CNL, and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines in 1987.