Foot and Fire

This is not your ordinary love story. While the storytelling in the poem is creative, the facts are all based on research regarding the ecosystem and nothing is made up for the sake to fit the intention of the poem. Thus, it is true that Whale Sharks are not like the usual fierce shark, it is true that they are huge, it is also true that they do eat the algal blooms causing red tide and it is true that shrimps are not their main food. If humans keep feeding them because of tourism, the young whale sharks will never learn how to look for places where algal blooms abound and red tide will most likely occur since it will only rely on the shrimps being fed to them everyday, while the old ones will get full with the ready catch and will no longer hunt for their main food. In short, the chain of the ecosystem will get broken. The human-admirer is the one to suffer in the end, and all of this was realized by the enamored Whale Shark in the poem. Indeed, this is not your ordinary love st...

It was a pleasant personal discovery for me when I learned that Dapitan City and Dipolog City of Zamboanga Del Norte can be reached via Ceres Liner in about 10-hour ride.   My friends and I did not catch the lone Ceres trip going that route and we decided to get to   Dumaguete and catch any trip from there. To our surprise, there are lots of Ro-ro operating and though we initially banked on Fastcat, it was full already, so we lined up and eventually rode the Montenegro Lines. We slept our way through the 3-hour sail and we were in Mindanao already. Amazing.  From the port, we rode our first public tricycle which can seat two sets of two passengers inside facing each other and is funnily designed like the head of a sailboat which has higher front seat and lower on the other side. And so, we started our Day One after we had lunch at the famous Sunday eat-all-you-can in Kalan-an ni Manay with lechon and seafood fare in Dapitan City. RIZAL IN DAPITAN After ...

My sister repeatedly tells me that she liked my first booklet, Framed Words, because it contains essays aside from poems for the reason that not everyone can appreciate poems but can surely follow an essay. So, here is my tip for everyone to enjoy a poem or two in the collection, Specks. A poem is a telling of a story in as little words as possible. Let's take  Mother eagle's Lullaby (Inspired by a visit at the Philippine Eagle Center, Davao City) in page 29 of Specks. I loved the idea that our Philippine Eagles are monogamous and take care of their hatchling together. This made me read more about them. What resulted is a creative storytelling of the reproductive habits of Philippine eagles, meaning, all information in the poem is based on my research on Philippine eagles' mating habit and how they take care of their birdlings. From the voice of a mother eagle and in the first few lines, what is being established is the pregnancy of the mother eagle: "You were i...

    I met her through a friend who introduced us so I can help her tell her story. When I met her, Lady M was approaching seventy, and listening to her preparing for her highschool alumni homecoming was like listening to a spirited   seventeen-year-old who is preparing for her debut. So, I was thinking, she is really ready for this. I was wrong. So she will be named as Lady M in this story to protect her family from unwelcome questions given the fact that the generation after her is all well-off because Lady M survived poverty single-handedly. Lady M, wearing her corn-colored brimmed hat and hugging her albummed photographs she entitled, The Journey of my Life, can easily be spotted as one of the senior citizens of the world waiting for her time to be heard because the succeeding generations are busy surviving their own poverty of any sort. Surprisingly, because I took time to listen to her, I was enriched. She grew up as a seventh child in a family of eight ...