University of Santo Tomas (1611-2011) Lights the World

University of Santo Tomas (1611-2011) Lights the World

Dr Abe V Rotor

After 400 years, celebration ends, begins a new mark;
UST - pride of the nation and region, of the world;
where great men and women passed under the Arch
of the Centuries, armed with truth and the Word.

Born in the Renaissance, the age of Enlightenment,
bridged Europe across the seas and the Orient;
where cultures clashed, earthly life and the firmament,
humbling them into consequential agreement.

Emerging from the Dark Ages after a thousand years,
you carried on the Greco-Roman influence,
through sword and cross, emblem of your forebears
who forged an East-West confluence.
You lived through trials and triumphed with the nation,
a Lazarus after colonization, two world wars,
of ideologies and faiths, of world order in revolution,
taking neither side but followed the stars.

The world in your campus, long before globalization;
knowledge encompassing in tune with the times,
searching, beyond Galileo, answer to the question,
"Quo vadis humanus?" through inevitable signs.

What bigger challenge UST - idealist, classical, dreamer -
as the world has gone a thousand-fold increase
of man’s expression of sapiens, faber, lugens in that order!
Old but firm stands the Arch of the Centuries. ~