"Tabernacles" by Angela Manalang Gloria

If my proud lips
Should ever wilt in wan
Despair, I shall return this way and creep
Again into
This sanctuary of fold
On fold of umber hush, and, broken, weep.

For in a dusk
As consecrate as this,
When holy moments rise upon the vast
To spread the heavy
Silence of the stars,
There shall be none to see me grovel past

The fallen towers
Of my pride: and though
My flesh should shrink from crucibles of pain
Avenging years
Will carve, I shall be spared
The scorn of pity of a world profane.

For in one garden
In Gethsemane,
In such a twilight tabernacle bared
Alone to stars
That see not, even He
One dropped in anguish . . . and no mortal cared!

27 August 1930

Source: Manlapaz, Edna Zapanta, ed. The Complete Poems of Angela Manalang Gloria. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila UP, 1993. 65