Cirilo Bautista

A Man Falls To His Death

1 Blood is nothing. Space is all. Is.

2 A simple diagram illustrates this

3 where A is the tenth floor of steel and glass (He was on

4 the noon shift forging the dream to a reality fine mean

5 could slumber in, or whores, in antechamber, touch their bone)

6 and B the level earth (Above the clogged engine

7 a shadow traced the lines on his foot, while shoot

8 his brain with firelights the money did). Put

9 down an imaginary circle around the vertical.

10 Compute the square of guilt against an integral

11 his age built when he was young: wrong,

12 axiomatic: the sum stands thus: Along

13 the curve X (none noticed the leap; what they saw

14 was the red imprint) by which we know

15 the nothing particualr, the momentum

16 carried him to the point beyond the dictum—

17 Hic primus geometros—for a body physical, a

18 Mass, emits energy equal to zero, the stay

19 Necessary to arrive at a base, as in Berger’s

20 Formula for optics. Here we remember

21 the fallacy of inclusive force if we extend

22 A to the absolute (He was, a day ago, threatened

23 With dismissal for displeasing a superior)

24 and call it the Cause: heat, hunger, air—

25 these were just contingent. To recapitulate:

26 Berger’s law does not apply here, as the late

27 Projections of X show, space being non-mathematic;

28 from A to B the descent exhibits a quick

29 increase in force, though the exact ellipsis we know not.

30 (The Blank and Blank Co., Inc., regrets to announce that. . . .)

Kung Paano Matatamo Ang Katahimikan Sa Mundo

Nakikilala sa kulay ng balat, ‘ika nga,

kaya sa San Francisco’y maingat ako

habang nanaghiihntay ng bus patungong Iowa.

Malakas daw ang racial prejudice, sabi nila,

kawawa ang mga Negro at mga di puti,

malapit na raw magrebolusyon dahil dito.

Ngatog na ngatog ako sa takot at gutom

dahil kalalapag ko lang buhat sa Tokyo.

Pumasok ang isang Negro sa istasyon—

naka-African hairdo, may hawak na munting

latigo: nakatatakot tumingin, kaya

di ko siya tinignan. Kumakalansing

ang pilak na borlas ng kanyang sapatos

at sigaw niya, “Peace, brothers!” Ngumiting litaw

ang mapuputing ngipin. Tinignan ako—

siguro’y natawa siya sa kanyang natanaw—

isang dayuhang maliit, maitim na kung

saana lupalog nanggaling. Bumaligtad

ang aking bituka sa takot at dumukot

ako ng sigarilyo para di malantad

ang pamumula ng aking mukha. Nahalata

kong pati ang mga Putting naroo’y tahimik

na tahimik, di makaimik sa harapan

ng Negrong iyon. Pagkaalis lang niya nagbalik

ang normalcy sa loob ng istasyon—nagbasang

muli ang iba, tsismisang muli ang mga miron,

tawanan, ang dyanitor ay muling nagwalis.

Maya-maya’y nagdaang muli ang Negrong iyon

Kaakbay ang dalawang Amerikanang puti,

Blonde, at sa kagandaha’y walang kaparis.

Napatigil ang dyanitor sa pagwawalis.

Naisip ko, ‘Ganito pala ang racial prejudice.”

Pedagogic

I walked towards the falling woods

to teach the trees all that I could

of time and birth, the language of men,

the virtues of hate and loving.

They stood with their fingers flaming,

Listened to me with a serious mien:

I knew the footnotes, all the text,

my words were precise and correct—

I was sure that they were learning—

till one tree spoke, speaking in dolor,

to ask why I never changed color.

Walking Around in Brussels

They are building a bigger Metro

in Brussels, it will take three years.

The streets are one large gaping wound, with

their intestines strewn on the sidewalks,

while somewhere in my brain Bob Marley

sings about cutting trees with a small axe.

From Grand Place to Palace Royale

men in orange coats to pick and shovel

the earth to expose the vein for the steel

couplings, electric wires, stone steps,

and metal signs that would link human

muscles with the whirling earth, so that

men would reach it faster, cheaper,

but not Bob Marley’s man, the herbsman,

who can cure his wound with a chant.

What does it want, this city of old folks?

Should they not totter on a cane or drag

their carcass across the lane? Why should

they get nowhere faster, as if their bone

bewailed contemplating tulips

in the sun and birds pecking at crumbs?

Let them move like snails, if need be,

let them stumble and fall on their skin,

let their sorrow begin, but their solitude

also, the whell of their soul, which moves them

to their heart’s tune, not the Metro’s,

nor any architect’s. The paths

of their soul have no texts,

only calling cards that fly with the wind,

and the wind, O the fickle wind,

when it calls them, they crawl from fire

and blanket, still bleary-eyed,

to follow it to yet another vague, fearsome sleep.

(1983)

Dead Weight: In Memoriam

(Ferdinand E. Marcos, 11 September 1917-28 September 1989)

A death that stuns the wheels of government

And carves enmity in the hearts of men—

How do we sing the darkness in this thing?

There is a need to fix our voice against

The weight of our loss, so that all in all,

As we polish the weapons to blast the threat

Of his ghost, our discourse does not disclose

Our kinship with his blood, but from monstrous

Corners of memory bring out poisoned

Phrases to fling at his flesh—“Thief,” “Scoundrel,”

“Usurper of heritage”—those terrible

Maledictions he finely deserves, so much

Did he trick us in his long governance.

We will yield no quarter in this noble fight

To cleanse history of his stench! Let him rot

Abroad, let his brood burn in our anger’s heat,

Let us persecute his friends—those blind lackeys

Who still lick his prints! An eye for an eye. . .

Bah! He started it all, and the law upholds

The virtue of our violence. Let us then

Be firm: our vision of one happy nation

Founded on Faith, Honor and Justice must not

Be shaken by this abominable

Carcass or the pleadings of his clan—lock

The waterways, patrol the air, check the land—

He Must Not Come Home, He Must Not Rest in Peace!

(1 October 1989)

Excerpt from Telex Moon (Part Three)

The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus

In the begininng God was pain in the void,

a cosmic wound pulsing with brilliant blood

like a poem, like the bullets floating in

my flesh after the smoke, the existent

who is non-existent. To say that of man

or of any categoric being,

is only to philosophize, as to

conclude that because the motorguards who

run over children in the part are doing

their duty, the levies on machineries

ought to be revoked, is only to beg

the point. The sea crawls as it ought to crawl,

dragging the seaweeds and the seastones with it.

as it should, but to conclude it retards

the growth of hibiscus and ephemera,

or clog the brains of statesmen on rainy days,

is to debase one’s own persona. To say

of this City that it is the City

of God favored by the cross-sticks and cross-lights

Aramaic, is to dress violence

in pied puppetry. The caverns of Cana

and the judges of Jerusalem still count

their coins, tied to the Central Bank and Supreme

Court by telex geography. To begin

is to die, die miserably in the flux

the void supports, not like the phoenix who

blooms from the pieces of his myth, who stachs

his library with antiquarian scripts

that advertise his r ise, die in the very

syllable of birth, in the very moment

of birth—“To see or to perish is the one

condition laid upon everything that

makes up the universe”—before the names

acquire citizenship to adorn the beard;

Buddha, Jesus, Zoroaster, Mahomet,

Invisible lights in a visible worlds,

visible worlds in an invisible light,

charging with energy the real world

which is not th real world, beating with sheep’s

staff and epistles the unbelievers,

die with the lotus in their throat. Turning

and turning in the abstract womb, each petal

an epitaph, they wait for the messenger

with their birth certificates, and waiting thus,

do nothing with their hands. It is so with this

world which we inhabit in the argument

for tin roofs and rice wine, a double world

of that which will come in the name of the

unborn now already festooned with angels

and mangers. It is with this City

which is a finger of this world, whose taxes

would intoxicate a yogi with its

numerals and numismatics, a kamic

flotation, the ledger of the islands.

“The asseblage of pious legacies,

temporalities, and other funds ands

property placed in the care of several

administrative committees, for pious

purposes as well a charitable,

constitutes the chief capital employed

in external trade; and notwithstanding

the failures which from time to time occur,

the subsequent accumulations of

the enormous premiums obtained for funds

laid out in maritime speculations,

both in time of peace and war, not only

suffices to make up all losses of

the above kind, but also to secure

the punctual payment of such charitable

pensions and other charges as are to be

deducted from the respective profits

of this species of stock.” As much of this

abundance the pygmies could bury in jars

they buried in jars, having no ice-chests

or bank accounts, worshipping no idols

that would divide their polemics. But their

poor brothers, who lived in caracoas

and brick houses, shuttled between temples

and money minters, could not balance their book,

still cannot balance their book, comic bungling

artists in trapeze acts. Cum grano salis,

con espiritu santo, the prophets

who squat on City corners waiting for

the glorious birth wait like marionettes

without strings, but still caterwauling over

the revenue. Prophets without honor

in the City, they denounce the City

amidst the hubbub of old pots and kettles,

foot-powered grindstones, cracking belfry, wooden

clappers and levers, their eyes burning red

in madness, thinking of the impending doom,

shouting, “Light the lamps! Light the lamps!” Chattels

in a cosmic household? Lepers in clean

synagogues? Who knows the vision they have

will save this City? Who will wager against

the rab of their faith? A faith draconic

or chordotonal could erect in one breath

the platform for choraguses, with spices

and balsam sweetening the oil, sweetening

the soil, for the one dramaturgy.

Excerpt from Sunlight on Broken Stones

The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus

 4

Do What? Chimes I never heard, or halos wore,

the stone upon whose sheen I swore to shackle

the sharks, the barks I blew across cinnamon

and thyme in lieu of lupercals, lunes for lakes,

rice-cakes, bullets, parapets, donjons: of these

my bones sing like a book, beyond indigenes

and ultimatums: white in the solid dream

yet not contained in the plastic tide, wide brides

side by side move these islands whose chamber of

wisdom is the tomb, whose head of telex ticks

jigsaw jungles in jasmine clouds and parrots

in pine trees: whines the breeze, rankles the mind, march

the rues—the fat-bellied nothing does not lose:

of these my bones sing like a book, all these I

remember: I walk on a strand of cobwebbed

memory, I bring out my tools to incise

the sounds in history, and I remember:

him:: the cricket tree called to him with vultures

in his eyes: he shut the gates of sunlight and

propped epistles on the grass: the first spoke of

a terribel war between shifting mirrors

whose rage mathematic, technique pure, prevent

waterclerks from clipping the revenue: a

war of blood and brain cutting its own wound like

a diamond, a hooded abstract in twenty

carats: the second was a parable dressed

in lemon and turpentine; its line, printed

on sable, trumpeted tonsure as torture—

an experiment in cancer and royal

jigs: to invent what in the mind is optic

or midget is to grease contumely, is

to seal the concordat between pirates and

papal henchmen: the words hissed like flame against

metal: the terrible collusion that brought

ignorance to these Islands: and the third, O

the third was bantam, the third was brother to

the ox, the third stuck its feathers in gum and

broke the spine of priesthood: its intestines were

solid gold: it cackled the monasteries

to ruins: I walk on a strand of cobwebbed

memory and I remember: metal wings

beating conundrums in cathedral domes: that

doomed warrior Magellan, rusting with metals

in Mactan: that fruity sailor Legaspi,

drowning in his fever while in his thick eyes

Manila rose up on sticks and stones: that pale

Rizal, pinned like a butterfly to his texts,

Impotent as the alphabet he rode on:

“offerings of gold and silver and brass, and

blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine linen,

and goat’s hair and ram’s skin dyed red, and badger’s

skin’s, and shittim wood, oil for the light, spices

for anointing oil, andd for sweet incense, and

onyx stones, and also stones to be set in

blue ephod, and in blue breastplate”: the death with

their dryads and decimals, their spirit like

rubber mannequin—how long can they hold to

the letters of tombs? The pen sprouts their flesh and

numbers numb their bony solitude. So lost

the ghost they bought with their last gold, desiring

the warmth of womb, cursing the papers that etched

their sins: I remember: like glass, or a blade

of grass, I bend to the wind, throw the papers

to the wind, hoping the rustle will cover

the sound of ache in my heart for souls seeking

new homestead for their head. But more it is for

the world I weep to sweep away the decay

of warfare and darkness, and I am old and

childless, my words cannot shoot: The lotus moon

hands maximum on my lute—its pluck has dry

throats on the grass: alas! the lack the lutist

laments liks the art in my tongue which cannot

live long: my blood throbs with the wounds of ages—

Lapulapu, Humabon, Sikatuna,

Sulayman, Matanda, Mabini, Rizal,

Bonifacio—they clog the arteries of

my soul till I am aflame and through the heat

I see my people’s corpses piled high inside

th Walled City, their brains staining the streets,

the children’s limbs scattered like garbage upon

the mud, and the black words flapping like banners

in the wind, “Death to the Infidels!”: my blood

boils and I remember: the parables they

strung around our necks as amulets against

the unknown in the hope that catholic spells

would expel the voodoo in our speech, as each

to each we passed our sorrow: place the thumbs so,

on the temples, and hear my words, “for what man

knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit

of man which is in him?” Very like a kite

I am, cackling for a piece of the moon: touch

my words and my biography falls aparts:

dig into my breast and I have no heart: all

my patrimony burned with the fruit boats in

the Pasig when we abandoned the brown gods

for gunpowder and Paradise: whos eyes shape

the picture of our sin?: whose dagger shall draw

the poison from our blood?: what shall link our tongue

to the silent speech of the grave so that brave

words be quicker, be full, as I sing of things?

Pedagogic

I walked towards the falling woods

to teach the trees all that I could

of time and birth, the language of men,

the virtues of hate and loving.

They stood with their fingers flaming,

Listened to me with a serious mien:

I knew the footnotes, all the text,

my words were precise and correct—

I was sure that they were learning—

till one tree spoke, speaking in dolor,

to ask why I never changed color.

The Sea Cannot Touch

The sea cannot touch me now

nor the sky

in this room whose arms are

your arms

They would spell the night

I took you for my wife

I do not think of candles in that church

Though they were there

the priest the words though they

were there

I think only of your sad

beautiful face following

the nothing there/the nothing

to construct our lives with/hoping

the singing birds would come

and house among its branches

Walking Around in Brussels

They are building a bigger Metro

in Brussels, it will take three years.

The streets are one large gaping wound, with

their intestines strewn on the sidewalks,

while somewhere in my brain Bob Marley

sings about cutting trees with a small axe.

From Grand Place to Palace Royale

men in orange coats to pick and shovel

the earth to expose the vein for the steel

couplings, electric wires, stone steps,

and metal signs that would link human

muscles with the whirling earth, so that

men would reach it faster, cheaper,

but not Bob Marley’s man, the herbsman,

who can cure his wound with a chant.

What does it want, this city of old folks?

Should they not totter on a cane or drag

their carcass across the lane? Why should

they get nowhere faster, as if their bone

bewailed contemplating tulips

in the sun and birds pecking at crumbs?

Let them move like snails, if need be,

let them stumble and fall on their skin,

let their sorrow begin, but their solitude

also, the whell of their soul, which moves them

to their heart’s tune, not the Metro’s,

nor any architect’s. The paths

of their soul have no texts,

only calling cards that fly with the wind,

and the wind, O the fickle wind,

when it calls them, they crawl from fire

and blanket, still bleary-eyed,

to follow it to yet another vague, fearsome sleep.

(1983)

Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista

AY 1986-1987

Status: RETIRED | Rank: FULL PROFESSOR | Department: LITERATURE, DEPARTMENT OF |

College:COLLEGE OF LIBERAL ARTS | Present Role in the University: PROFESSOR EMERITUS
Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista was conferred the Order of National Artist in 2015 by Philippine President Benigno C.
Aquino, Jr. Nominated to this highest honor by his peers for the sheer quantity and substance of his
literary production, Cirilo F. Bautista has become not only an exemplar in the University but is also an
inspiration to young Filipino writers in the archipelago and wherever they may be in the world, for them
to enrich the body of Philippine Literature with substance and song.

Conferment of the Order of National Artist given in Malacañan Palace by President Benigno Aquino, Jr.
National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista, seated.

His magnum opus, the epic “The Trilogy of St. Lazarus,” published by De La Salle University Press in 2012,
reimagines the journey of the peoples of the Philippines throughout its history and boldly reinvents
through the epic singer’s voice and temperament the unending quest for freedom from want, from
oppression, from the forces of society that threaten the dignity of the individual citizen, especially the
poor.



CIRILO F. BAUTISTA’S LYRIC SENSE OF HISTORY

Pagpupugay: A Tribute to the National Artist for Literature

By Marjorie Evasco
In a lecture called “Shaping the Past” delivered at his alma mater, the University of Santo Tomas,
National Artist Cirilo F. Bautista revealed that it was his father who had given him the words which
defined the poet’s ground of being and gave him his lifetime errand:

“I became a writer because I took to heart my father’s advice to “shape the past.” He did not tell me
how, but I thought writing was the way to do it. He did not tell me why, either, but I felt it was to gain
some degree of happiness, some ascendancy over the travails of existence…And a strong desire to make
of the past something beyond the past drove me into a fine madness and defined the borders of my
artistry. And so, every time I am asked when I decided to be a writer, because, strangely enough, I did
decide to be a writer—I answer, “When I first got mad.” That moment, of course, was not accompanied
by a roar of thunder and a blaze of lightning; like all life-altering decisions, it developed quietly and
gradually until, many years later, I found that I was irrevocably engaged in the fashioning of prose and
poetry. I discovered that writing was the most effective way of configurating the elements of reality into
an ever-fresh world and that literature was the only possible, faithful, and unassailable reconstruction of
human values in a gaudy and duplicitous environment.”

One of the marks of the lyric poems of Bautista is the constitution or the making of the image or eidos of
persons who are familiar in Philippine society and history, like Rizal, Bonifacio, the tear-gassed man, and
even the one who says he is being used by big shots for target practice. Eidos here is used to mean “that
which is seen, the form, shape, figure, or its Latin meaning, as species.” Bautista reconstitutes figures
from history by giving them an individual speaking voice. This lyric imperative is best seen in the light of
the Greek concept of the figured masks or personae that represent the self as well as others like the self.
Bautista reconfigures figures from history by giving them an individual speaking voice.

In the poem “What Rizal Told Me,” Bautista presents to us the personae of Rizal and Cirilo, the poet’s
double. The discursive situation is a conversation through 13 stanzas of 4 lines each between the man
that Filipinos hail as the nation’s hero and the poet Cirilo. The voice, as we read from the title, is the
voice of Cirilo, retelling the reader what Rizal told him. The retelling, however, is in the dramatic mode,
and from the first line to the last, it is Rizal’s voice that is represented in the poem.

I have learned the subtle virtue of regret,

how it can ride a mad horse and not fall off.

At times it is necessary to invent

Illusions that would change the map

Of your consciousness, if only to feel

you could not have done things any better.

A man is bound, shot, and carted off

to argue with worms—is he less valid

as an agent of peace, will you break

the bones of his philosophy?

The voice is that of a man of intellect engaging the poet in the rhetoric that burdens an otherwise
peaceful man with the irretrievability of the past and places the law “between violence and violence”
where there are “…angels and vampires/ whose diction vexed [my] blood”. Language, such as that used
by the colonizers was used to turn worship into a terrorizing religion. On the other hand, language, such
as the one used by the revolutionaries turns idealists into beasts baring their teeth for the kill.

In the middle of the poetic discourse, Rizal faces and addresses Cirilo directly but in a conspiratorial tone
assuming a friendship that has shared many a secret:

…You know

how it was, Cirilo, you saw the hole

I was cramped in and despaired enough

to write that I failed because I left

no proof of “bloodstains on broken stones.”

There it is again, the phrase that is a consistent refrain in the poems of Bautista, and it is always always
spoken in the tone of anger and continuing confrontation with failure. Here is one of the sharpest
examples of what Bautista calls his choice of a “reasoned romanticism” over “unreasoned skepticism.”
Rizal reasons to Cirilo that even as the failure is irredeemable, the “sweating mass//…the roadmenders
and gardeners,/ the glassblowers and plowmen..” who are ignorant, need some solace, some hope:

I am the first thing they seek when they bleed,

I wipe the sorrow from their brow,

my throat sings their children to sleep,

they stick my face where fear has been,

I shape the lies that enliven their hopes—

That is how we rescue each other

from the rigors of obedience.

An elegiac statement concludes the poem: “History is the other side of regret.” At this point the voices of
Rizal and Cirilo merge, and the nature of the pain of regret is made intelligible. Behind the mask of the
hero, there is only the naked human face of a dead man. Behind the mask of the poet, there is the
vulnerable human heart of the poet singing an elegy to the race.

In the light of his poetics, Bautista must believe in the power of poetry, and betray the duplicitous world
that passes itself off as true. In the poem “The Intensity of Things” in which Bautista memorializes one of
his earliest teachers, a medicine woman named Anselma Carpio, the dialogue of a hard realist’s wisdom
with that of the poet’s reaches out of the long and common history of the dying poor in this country:

Believe and betray—is that not

the system we support to survive,

chance and certainty commingling

in the acts we put up and then regret?

Bautista asserts that Anselma “was the only sane person” in his insane world in his youth in the slum
areas of Balic-Balic Sampaloc after World War II. It was a world haunted by death and the proximity of
bitterness and despair. But like Selma, he “never despaired of [my] situation” but believed that there was
a way of squeezing from the world some astonishment by becoming a poet.

The betrayed poor can only return to faithlessness for the treason that is committed against them. But in
the same breath, the lyric voice enjoins them to understand the price of choosing to live:

But we say to ourselves, “We will be strong,

life is long,” though we quake in the saying

of it, in the terrible burden of it.

This is the heart of Cirilo F. Bautista’s historia, his sense of history, his intimate knowing of the story of
our people. In his poem called “The New Philippine National Anthem,” the speaker concludes:

But I will always love you, Philippines

because in the dead of night, when the enemies

creep closer to the gate to break the bones of our hate,

when the pale men with foreign tongues pillage

your mountains and meadows for minerals of money,

money, money, when we are broke and hungry and cold,

you keep us together with the warmth of your voice

whispering such word as “Peace,” such word as “Freedom.”

We listen to the cadence of this song and know it is our anthem, too, the dream we share with Cirilo F.
Bautista, poet of the first order, who serves to “reinstate words to their position in the social
imagination.”

We as readers, lovers of words, believers in the language of “peace” and “freedom,” have the task to
engage, under the instruction of the poet, in “respecting and safeguarding the language of the soul.”
Only then can we stand side by side with Cirilo F. Bautista, speaking like him unflinchingly to power, to
ensure that the language of our soul is never going to be corrupted by the greedy and the malicious.
Poetry like Bautista’s shapes for us our first and only frontier of being.

National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista, 76, writes 30

Ruel S. De Vera - 1 year ago

A man immersed in the greatness of the creative word throughout his life, Cirilo Francisco Bautista died
Sunday at the age of 76.

Bautista was elevated to the Order of the National Artist (ONA) of the Philippines in 2014 by President
Benigno Aquino. He is survived by his wife Rosemarie and three children.

Presidential proclamation No. 809 read: “Whereas, the works and achievements of Cirilo F. Bautista as a
poet, fictionist and essayist have greatly contributed to the development of the country’s literary arts
and has strengthened the Filipino’s sense of nationalism.”

National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista, 76, writes 30

Ruel S. De Vera - 1 year ago

NATIONAL ARTIST for literature Cirilo Francisco Bautista. FILE PHOTO

A man immersed in the greatness of the creative word throughout his life, Cirilo Francisco Bautista died
Sunday at the age of 76.

Bautista was elevated to the Order of the National Artist (ONA) of the Philippines in 2014 by President
Benigno Aquino. He is survived by his wife Rosemarie and three children.
Presidential proclamation No. 809 read: “Whereas, the works and achievements of Cirilo F. Bautista as a
poet, fictionist and essayist have greatly contributed to the development of the country’s literary arts
and has strengthened the Filipino’s sense of nationalism.”

At a 2015 testimonial dinner at his alma mater the University of Santo Tomas, Bautista said this of being
named National Artist: “It is a kind of confirmation, that after 74 years, you know you can write.”

That he truly did. One of the last living iconic writers of his generation, Bautista wrote poetry, fiction and
essays. His best known work is the epic poetry trilogy “The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus,” made up of the “The
Archipelago (1970), “Telex Moon” (1981) and “Sunlight on Broken Stones” (1999).

A prolific writer, he had written more than 20 books, his last being the poetry collection “In Many Ways:
Poems 2012-2016,” published by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in 2018.

He was also a noted critic and respected teacher. He was literary editor and a columnist for the Manila
Bulletin’s Philippine Panorama Magazine.

Bautista was born in Manila on July 9, 1941, growing up in Balic-Balic in Sampaloc. He graduated from
the University of Santo Tomas with a degree in AB Literature magna cum laude.

He earned his MA in Literature from St. Louis University magna cum laude and his doctorate in Language
and Literature from De La Salle University. He remains the only Filipino to be given an honorary degree
from the prestigious International Program at the University of Iowa.

“It is with deep sadness we announce the passing of our beloved professor/mentor and perhaps the
greatest poet in the annals of Philippine literature–Dr. Cirilo F. Bautista. Rest in peace, our Moses,
Gandalf, Nero Wolfe, Obi Wan Kenobi. Till we meet again in Paradise,” read a statement on the DLSU
Department of Literature Facebook page.

Much published locally and aboard, Bautista was named to the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards Hall of
Fame in 1995, which is given to winners of five first prizes. Bautista had won nine Palanca in all, for essay,
fiction, poetry in both English and Filipino.

He had also won First Prize in the 1998 National Centennial Commission literary tilt. He received the
Gawad Balagtas from the Unyon ng Manunulat ng Pilipinas, among many other accolades.

Bautista taught at St. Louis University, San Beda College and DLSU, where he was Professor Emeritus for
Literature and sat on the board of advisors of the Bienvenido Santos Creative Writing Center. He served
as Senior Associate at the UST Center for Creative Writing and Studies.

A thoughtful man known to his close friends as “Toti,” Bautista served as a mentor to countless younger
writers through his own efforts and as part of many panels at writing workshops.

Bautista had funded the Cirilo F. Bautista Prize for Short Fiction at the National Book Award and the
separate Cirilo F. Bautista Prize for the Novel. He was also an avid painter, having exhibited his work
professionally several times.

At the 2015 dinner, Bautista spoke about the point of writing poetry, the form he is most identified with.
“The poem is meant to give delight to the readers,” he said.

He spoke one truly extraordinary statement that evening, one that seemed to exemplify his life and
legacy.

“For artists, art does not just imitate life,” Cirilo F. Bautista said, surrounded by the words he savored
and the people he love. “Art becomes the life.”