Odes to my Idol Writers and Authors

                                             By Abe V Rotor

1. To Jose Rizal

Your enemies tried to silence you,
     and curtailed your freedom;
the lamp flickers its last rays at dawn
     to seal your martyrdom.

2. To Aesop
Ah! Animals talk louder than men
though in screech, crow and bleat;
yet by moral and sanity, speak
not the language on the street.

3. To Ernest Hemingway
You seemed as brave as the old man
     in your great masterpiece;
the soldier, the hunter, the dreamer -
     yet wanting a life of peace.

4. To Charles Darwin
You did not give up to your critics,
    who only prayed and preached;
Around the world you witnessed,
    change by random and fit.

5. To Lola Basiang (penname of Severino Reyes 
You touched a million-and-one lives,
     around campfires in their prime;
like Grimm and Anderson and Homer,
     storytellers of all time.

6. To Boris Pasternak
Zhivago, to the end walked away alone,
from love neither in winter nor fallow;
what romance away from the war zone
wrapped him in doubt and sorrow.

7. To Mark Twain 
I am a boy forever, Tom or Huck,

    down the Mississippi loafing;
and let the world go on sans care
    what grownups are missing.

8. To Robert Louis Stevenson
"Kidnapped" made a boy into man
too soon to faced a cruel world;
learning quickly the art of war
deceit, conceit, gun and sword.

9. To Oscar Wilde 
You're a creator of characters and events,
     in novels, stories, and plays
children and adults alike on the armchair
     live in those times and places.

10. To Arthur Conan Doyle
"Sherlock Holmes" lives to this day,
     idol of any detective;
"The Lost World" remains of the past,

     is back in our midst to live. ~