Mikael de Lara Co: Don Carlos Palanca Awardee for Poetry

The horizon, my ancestors say,
is an eye. When it shuts
its lashes sift the sea for rafts

and turn fishermen and divers to stone,
their hands still clenched around pearls,
their blood turning crystalline and cold.

The gods were in love with the horizon.
They hung their jewels
on the night-sky and ebbed into the eye
while my people stared
at the orphaned trinkets.

The poem above is an excerpt from the the poem Archipelago by Mikael "Kael" de Lara Co. It is part of his award-winning collection "Hands for a Fistful of Sand." Other poems in the collection are Silence and Cryptic.

Hands for a Fistful of Sand won for Kael the First Prize for Poetry for this year's Don Carlos Palance Memorial Awards for Literature.

Kael was my classmate at AdMU. He was a BS Environmental Science major, but everybody knew his heart was in literature, in creatively tying up simple words and making them mean so much more.

This award is proof of his infinite genius. I believe he is going to be one of the poets of our generation who will define for us what Filipino poetry is in the second millennium.

Congratulations Kael!!!

Abo Sa Dila

Abo Sa Dila (Ash on the Tongue) is the title of Mikael Co's blog. Who, you ask, is Mikael Co? Mikael or Kael is a graduate of Ateneo de Manila University, a former writer for Heights (AdMU's Literary Publication). He is a wonderful creative writer in both Filipino and English. Kael is the only person I know who can get away with speaking and reciting in Tagalog in an English or Philosophy (in English) class. He is that brilliant.

His latest post, Senti-naryo is his 100th blog entry. In the entry, he writes his sentiments about a number of random things.

Abo sa Dila is basically a peek into Kael's mind: his musings, reflections, and other things that are sometimes deep and sometimes mundane. He is always witty and sharp. He also posts his poems and other products of his bursts of creativity. Most of his blog's entries are in Tagalog.