Raul Rafael Ingles, poet

He was first a poet.

In midlife, he became a Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Paris diplomat, like us: Raven poet-artist Hilario S. Francia, Raven essayist-philosopher Adrian E. Cristobal Sr. and I, the only Raven girl poet from the venerable University of the Philippines Writers Club.

Unbelievably (since he studied in a seminary in Hong Kong), the Poet Laureate of “Manila, My Manila,” Nick Joaquin, elected himself Honorary Raven with five precious pieces in our “Ravens in Love Anthology, Book II.”

Cheeky Adrian promised us “immortality”…

“It’s not immodesty to call the Ravens, or any writer for that matter, ‘immortal.’ Until all books are burned, every written word, good or bad, achieves immortality. Language is immortal. Proof of this is that dead Ravens … live on in the pages of ‘Ravens 2,’” Adrian wrote in his column The Breakfast Table (Philippine Daily Inquirer, July 30, 1997).

How and why have I survived them all like, perhaps, a tribal priestess to intone prayers? Or one of those Chinese women wailing for the dead to the thunderous striking of gongs with sweet intervals of flute music?

Larry went out first, quietly, alone on a gurney … “Oh, no! No!” I thought I screamed wildly at crematorium attendants. But all who came with me said I was stonily silent.

Only an hour after he heard of Larry’s silent trip to Funeraria Paz, Nick arrived, weeping, at my private Café Orfeo, without his famous “small bear” and, for the first time, deigned to drink my French wine, named Saint Raphael, for Raul Rafael actually, his last Raven wine glass before months after I was chosen by the family to read my Tribute to Nick Joaquin at the Santuario de San Antonio in Forbes Park.

Larry was Nick’s favorite tease, calling him Hila-rious! How the national and international press hounded me for the tear-stained copy of my “tribute,” an obituary I did not intend to write.

I thought, arrogantly, that Adrian would be the last of us remaining…. Yet, it was for Adrian E. Cristobal Sr. that I sent my Perfume Prayer to his Breakfast Table in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, “A Raven-in-love book writer at the breakfast table: A requiem for Adrian E. Cristobal Sr.,” on Feb. 3, 2008.

Like a crown, on all their Roman-like sculptured heads, I laid, stoically, without tears, fresh, breathing perfume of white flowers. So still, so silent, I whispered to myself at all those Ravens, like at Raul Rafael now, who went this December cold night without a cry.

With Raven fictionist Rony V. Diaz as the only one standing by me, the one Raven woman poet left, once more, I did it my way a la Frank Sinatra.

I offered to Raven poet Raul Rafael, lying still and silent in the Mt. Carmel chapel, what the Greeks and Romans give—amaranth flowers for such a reincarnation by poets of their dead…

Amaranths are flowers imagined, never fading. They do not fall, or decay.

Being fiction, news reporters cannot note their beauties during wakes. Archaeologists have no measuring data or florists have no use or price for Immortal Amaranths that embalm a woman’s cry in the song of a silenced poet.

Will people ever ask the lost Raven poets this fateful question by the namesake of Raul Rafael, the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, called El Angel Bueno?

Who are you?

Who are you? Tell us, for we do not remember you,

Whether earth or in heaven?

No, they did not know you, the souls you did not know.

But mine did.

People of the street corners of the world and countries not on maps making remarks,

That man is dead, and he does not know it.

But mine did.

O, deep desire, firm marble, firm light and shining waters of my soul.

Someone said, Rise up! and I found myself where you were.