Contemplative Echoes: Reflective Compositions

MAY 2025 ILA Magazine "EDITOR'S CHOICE"

The road to any dream is never easy but every small step, every quiet struggle and every choice to continue matters. This is for all who have walked that path and for those still walking it.

*****

"HE WALKED ANYWAY"

He never had money for snacks. Sometimes not even for lunch. His stomach learned silence before he learned algebra.

He walked - long roads, cracked shoes, sun in his face, rain on his back. Sometimes barefoot, sometimes blistered but always moving. He was always left behind - in paying tuition fees, in field trips and school nights, in the fun he couldn't afford. Promissory notes kept him enrolled, hope kept him going. They called him a loser. They called him slow. They laughed when he failed again. He laughed too, just to survive the sound of it.

At night, he worked. Washed dishes, sold balut on dim-lit corners, rose before dawn to peddle pandesal while the city still slept. He scrubbed the tired off day for a few coins and a little rice. He was always behind. Always the one who didn't get picked. Always the one with excuses that were actually reasons.

But he showed up. Every damn day. With eyes that refused to close and hands that wouldn't let go of books that barely made sense but made him feel something other than stuck.

He failed again and again. But something inside him kept whispering: Some battles are won by just taking a small step forward.

And so he stayed - in the fight, in the hunger, in the walking, the working, the losing.

Until one day - they called his name. He stood on a stage with a secondhand shirt and a trembling smile.

They clapped. Not knowing that every step he took was a war.

And finally, he won!

© Jeffrey Cejero

---

We say, "You are what you eat!" Well, I eat sunlight...and wrote this to say, "I am light poetically and scientifically."

"TO BE LIGHT"

I am light, not just in metaphor, not just in myth but also in blood, in bone, in breath. Born of sunlight, ancient fire filtered through leaves, through grain, through skin.

The food I eat is yesterday's radiance, stored in root and fruit, harvested into muscle, memory, and me. I do not just eat light.

I become it and they say, "You are what you eat!"

I am the echo of a star, a flare from billions of years ago,

a beam slowed into matter,

into thought,

into touch,

into love.

Einstein said, "E=mc2"

and what he meant was,

I am energy,

not merely alive,

but overflowing.

Enough to flatten mountains

but I won't

because I'd rather leave a gentler mark,

my name

remembered in the sky.

They say we are stardust

but that dust once burned.

It raged bright in the black,

lived as a furnace,

roared across aeons,

before falling silent.

And now,

here I stand,

the same fire

with a voice.

So I will not fold into shadow.

I will not cradle the cold.

Darkness is not my dominion.

Loneliness is not the air I breathe.

Regret is not my gravity.

I was built to blaze,

to split night with kindness,

to fracture sorrow

with my presence.

Light gives life, paints color into being, brings rainbows, lets stars be seen.

It makes us visible,

valued not forgotten.

This is light

and so am I!

© JEFFREY CEJERO Philippines