UNTIL MEMORY FADES

IN MEMORIAM: Former Chief Presiding Justice of the Court of Appeals of the Philippines. God speed, Choy. Your job is done here. In pace requiescat.


UNTIL MEMORY FADES


(For Justice Conrado "Choy: Vasquez, Jr. + March 12, 2015)


You have gone before another sunrise,
Choy, but you have chosen to take its place.
You will not need hills or seas or horizons
to rise from; by leaving us, you have risen
where you have caught His hand on time
to bear you up where He presides. Eternity.

Has anyone come back from this defiled form
and mapped out ways to get back to that eternity
we claim as heirs to, where days are as chartless
as the river stream that must flow to an endless,
ceaseless fountainhead which has no beginning?
There is no other way back except by destruction.

When every rampart has been carted away, we
do not pine for them like those we cannot lose
because we store them in vaults of our memory:
they are our milestones of an afterlife we choose
to build from achieved desires, fulfilled dreams--
these chambers of a heart that will not crumble.

What, indeed, do we know of eternity? Save this:
We are never away from it. Until memory fades.
"Habang may buhay, hindi ka namin makakalimutan."


---ALBERT B. CASUGA