“Poetry lives on love, and love is nothing but the worship of woman.”
Luis G. Dato, Philippines Herald Mid-week Magazine, April 6, 1932
By Luis G. Dato I The incense hangs on gilded Christmas shrines, Warm tapers bathe the walls in amber glow, In mumbled prayer, bead-counted prayer low, Devouts, deep-veiled, all drowse upon their lines, Anon with peals from drums and tambourines,…
By Luis G. Dato Lukban, you are the stirring of many summer dawns, You are a giant dahlia upon the clefted lawns, Your breezes are the spirit of princesses unseen, Aroma of the aeons and aeons that have been. There…
by Luis G. Dato “The Child shall be my own,” the moon in tender And venomous commiseration saith, “And she shall take the loveliness of death, Death’s countenance, her raiment of pale splendour; Body and soul to me she shall…
By Luis G. Dato By frowning hills and mountains Nippon has Builded her eyries dyed with innocent blood, She soared above the raging ocean’s flood, To light on corpses bared by rain and grass Those cliffs to us are holy,…
By Luis G. Dato Plebian Sire, who Freedom’s bolo drew, Whose cry to battle death to tyrant’s told, Whose hero soul can still our conscience hold With the same power that Tondo’s rebels knew. Who rose compelling high among the…
By Luis G. Dato Of Bagumbayan’s hero let us speak That future generations may with faith Abiding and eternal offer love Eternal and abiding. Liberty Which he espoused let not this late appear As lighted candle which moth’s wings must…
By Luis G. Dato The dead speak of the dead unto the living, And by the living little understood The trees they see too much to see the wood, And soul is lost in all the world’s mad striving. Of…
By Luis G. Dato On Vietnam’s marshes, set against dark hills, War inexorable goes on apace The torch to keep that lights the human race, Against the foe whose march insidious kills. Here is grim destiny, fierce minds, strong wills,…
by Luis G. Dato I Over the isles and oceans from the west And east, her armies surged, each echelon Landing as clockwork clicking with the dawn, Obedient to Fate’s summons, Time’s behest. Ally long missed, a much awaited guest,…
By Luis G. Dato I From Asia’s teeming highlands, coasts, and bays,They ploughed the outmost rim of ocean foam,In pathless deeps envisioning their home,Where suns perennial drop unsalted rays,They ventured from the people-trodden ways,And in their light, swift-winged barangays,The seas…
