Jose Rizal's Poems

TO MY FELLOW CHILDREN

Whenever people of a country truly love
The language which by heaven they were taught to use
That country also surely liberty pursue
As does, the bird which soars to freer space above.

For language is the final judge and referee
Upon the people in the land where it holds sway;
In the truth our human race resembles in this way
The other living beings born in liberty.

Whenever knows not how to love his native tongue
Is worse than any beast or evil swelling fish.
To make our language richer ought to be our wish
The same as any mother loves to feed her young.

Tagalog and the Latin language are the same
And English and Castilian and the angel’s tongue;
And God, whose watchful in the speech we claim.
Our mother tongue, like all the highest that we know
Had alphabet and letter of its very own;
But these were lost-by furious waves were overthrown
Like bancas in the stormy sea, long years ago.

MY FIRST INSPIRATION

Why do the scented flowers
In fragrant fray
Rizal each other’s flowers
This festive day?

Why is sweet melody bruited
In the sylvan dale,
Harmony sweet and fluted
Like the nightingale?

Why do the birds sing so
In the gender grass,
Flitting from bough to bough
With the winds that pass?
And why does the crystal spring
Run among the flowers
While lullaby zephyrs sing
Like its crystal showers?

I see the dawn in the east
With beauty endowed.
Why goes she to a feast
In a carmine cloud?

Sweet mother, they celebrate
You natal day
The rose with her scent innate,
The bird with his lay

MY LAST FAREWELL
(Mi Ultimo Adios)

Farewell, dear Fatherland, clime the sun caress’d,
Peal of the orient seas, our Eden lost!
Gladly now I go to give thee this faded life’s best,
And were it brighter, fresher, or more blest,
Still would I give three, nor count the cost.

On the field of battle,’mid the frenzy of fight,
Others have given theirs lives, without doubt or breed;
The place not