He came to the Nakem, this great man.
I did not know what to do initially. But he was there, in wheelchair, his faculties waning but he was there, in body and soul.
I held my tear when I saw him--and I manuevered the program to present him to the assembly.
The first time I saw him up close was when, in that 1982 GUMIL conference in San Fernando I won the on-spot-writing contest with my entry "In Obiter Dictum" he handed me a big trophy. I have kept that copy of Bannawag where I was there brimming, accepting the trophy and some wise editor captioned the picture with an apocalyptic sentence: `two generations of poets' and some words that completed it.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa
Sept 20/07
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