and all those who have disappeared
Fr Rudy Romano was a Filipino Redemptorist Priest – and a colleague – who advocated on behalf of the poor. He was abducted by government agents in 1985. No trace of him has been found, no one brought to account for his death. Like countless others.
As fruit from the tree of life
You were violently plucked in the dark hours
When evil stalks by the light from Hades
Lashed by the thorns of torture
You were strewn like garbage in unknown crevices
Of hidden safe-houses
Discarded perhaps in the terror
Of wayside graves or watery depths
Abandoned to the screaming silence
Of the unknown
Where are you
What has happened is happening to you
Are you alive (in some way)
Or have you long lay rotting
In graves marked only by the
Desecration of all that is human and sacred
Festering within us is this unspeakable pain
Of not knowing
Whether to search still for you the lost living
Or mourn for you the hidden dead
This interminable groping
In the hell of know knowing
Hurls us who long to see your face again
To the borders of helplessness
And savage pain
This ultimate violence of twisted minds
The refusal of the torturers to say
What they have done with their victims
Provokes a burning rage
A cry for vengeance and justice that
Explodes in the bowels of the earth
Inflames the Heavens to its farthest reaches
We are visited again by the ninth hour of desolation
When darkness covers the earth
The curtain in the temple of life is ripped asunder and
The cry of the disappeared is flung upon the winds:
Eloi eloi lema sabachthani?
Father we cry to you
For justice and mercy
For in you we hope as did our forefathers
As did our loved ones snatched from us the by prowlers of the night
As did Jesus of Nazareth
You did not abandon Him in death
Our disappeared have walked the path of Jesus
Have been nailed to the ground by injustice
May they rise with Him
To carry yet His call and challenge
Crushed upon the cross of evil
May they be empowered by your spirit
To return to us the life bled from them
In the days to come when
The darkness of unknowing is lifted from us
May we receive life from them
As from Your Spirit
May we hear their call
As we listen to Your Son
May we fulfil their broken dreams
As we strive to create your dream
Father of our history
May the violence of disappearance itself disappear
May your Kingdom come now
May your Justice reign now and forever
Amen Amen Amen
July 1987
