On Gloucester Road: October 1, 2014
by Li “Web Crease” Du
Beneath the concrete structures and skyscrapers of Hong Kong,
like magic, people in a crowd lift up their mobile phones,
turn on their lights, and hold them to the gods of freedom and
democracy, a strong-honed message held on high in hand.
Its beauty is spectacular, a river flowing down
the sidewalks and the streets, the bridges and the landscaped ground,
its wavelets scintillating in the city’s night-time air,
a healthy inspiration, a Pitié-Salpêtrière,
exploding forth with justice, like gunpowder in a war,
or nova in the cosmos starting from a white dwarf star.
Kobanê
by Scribe El Uwade
So it has come to this—Ayn al-Arab—the Arab Spring—
Kobanê, Daesh at the gates, in northern Syria,
with Turkey looking on, at the Kurds, apprehensively,
th’ Americans involved in bombing sites intensively,
with some reluctant Arab kingdoms from the Persian Gulf,
who long to keep their eminence, like as the desert wolf.
The clouds rise from the dusty city streets, as bullets fly in spikes.
By night and day thick smoke and flung debris rise from th’ airstrikes.
Around the Kurdish fighters, desert sands stretch far away.
Where did the Daesh fighters think they’d go who planned to stay?
Nik Wallenda in the Windy City: November 2, 2014
by Sid Cee Uberawl
“The dude is good.”
—”Bad” Weslie Ecru
He stepped up to skyscraper towers in the dark of night,
above Chicago River on a wire, long and tight,
to Leo Burnett Building from Marina Tower West,
and then blindfolded, to Marina Tower East from West.
In orange jacket, over tens of thousands’ cheering roar,
he trod among the gods, where only planes and jets dare soar.
As Nik Willenda got his butt across that wind-blown wire,
he tried to lean in as he walked, but winds blew him up high’r.
Life on the line, a sharp incline, filled with adrenaline,
he balanced goose bumps, chills, and thrills—one thin win on Earth’s spin.
The Wall-Fall Celebration: 2014
by Uwe Carl Diebes
Above the neoclassic Brandenburger Tor,
topped by the capital Quadriga, four-horsed chariot,
bright fireworks in scarlet-gold jet-streamers soar.
Below, 8000 helium ballons, each lit,
flit off along the pathway of the former wall,
ascending into night; the light, soft-white lunes lift.
Beside the Gate, whose love is but fantastical,
Beethoven’s 9th, his Hymn to Joy, superb, divine,
inspires Mut zur Freiheit, thunder-wonderful.
Behind this waterfall of colour, sound and sign,
a day of fate ‘s recalled in Berlin’s inner court,
der Schicksalstag, this awesome Fall, November 9th.
Photography © Allison Goldin
Message Dropped
by Wibele Escular
Self-righteous Greenpeace activists marched on the Nasca Lines.
It was their purpose to attract the World to their sign,
promoting energy that is renewable on ground.
They definitely got the World’s attention, when it found
their message to the UN Conference on Climate Change,
left marks upon the fragile desert none can rearrange.
Greenpeace had come to trample on Peru’s grand heritage,
though that was not the narrative that they had planned to etch.
The ground around the Nasca Lines consists of white sands topped
by layers of the darker rocks they’d ruffled—message dropped.
An Attack Upon Free Speech
by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei
Because of Sony’s film The Interview on Kim Jong-un,
it was attacked by North Korea’s Bureau 1-2-1,
an 1800 team of hackers trained in spying on
the enemies the tyrant wants to crush down with his brawn.
One hundred graduates a year will join the Bureau’s ranks.
That priv’leged bunch can wreak much havoc with their cyber pranks.
Like China’s Axiom, surreptitious and covert,
they’re underhanded bullies and they want to hit and hurt.
Now Sony has withdrawn the movie; it won’t be released.
A North Korean wins in his attack upon free speech.
Oleh Lysheha (1949-2014)
by Rus Ciel Badeew
You left Ukraine, when filled with pain, imploding in the east,
the Russian Bear was stirring there, that harking, barking Beast.
It wasn’t all that different, when you were at Lviv,
the Russian Bear was also there and forcing you to leave.
You were expelled and drafted to the Army of the Reds;
the Russian Bear forced you to clothe your poetry in shreds.
In time you found your way back to Kyiv to walk its streets;
in winter swimming icy waters, catching fish with teeth,
avoiding public transport, making paper from mushrooms,
a Bear who sorted bones with paws on ground that was still warm.
Bruce Wise writes in various charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms).
Li “Web Crease” Du is a poet interested in the Internet and Modernist, Postmodernist, and New Millennialist China. His little unpublished chapbook Sonnets From the Chinese, on Modernist Chinese writers born before 1920, has been excoriated by Lew Icarus Bede as a “work struggling, like the Chinese, to write sonnets, and interspersed with occasional flashes of brilliance…hardly worth the effort.”
Scribe El Uwade is a poet fascinated by Egypt in all of its manifestations, Ancient Egypt,
Hellenistic, a member of the Roman Empire, Byzantium, Muslim Egypt, Ottoman Egypt, British Egypt,
and present-day Egypt.
Sid Cee Uberawl is a poet of adventure, intrigued by travel into exotic places and extraordinary landscapes. His favorite film is Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Uwe Carl Diebes is a poet fascinated by German literature, and has been influenced by such writers
as Hölderlin, Heine, Nietzsche, and Hesse. In Germany, he met a woman named Sieglinde, who wrote
him passionate German sonnets; however, in a fit of propriety he threw them all away.
Wibele Escular is a poet enthralled by Argentina. His influences include, Jorge Borges,particularly
in his poetry, among many other Latin American and Iberian writers. In his poem on Córdoba, for
example, he is simultaneously drawing on both Góngora and Leopoldo Lugones Argüello.
Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is a poet of the Far East, in particular China. He admires writers, like Bei Dao,
and is the intimate of writers, such as Dae Wi “Scrub” Lee and Esca Webuilder. His favorite song is Psy’s
Oppan Gangham Style: “It’s got Seoul and a whole lotta lol.”
Rus Ciel Badeew is a poet of Russia and the Slavic peoples of eastern Europe. He has been influenced by Modernists Pasternak, Akhmatova, Blok, and Mayakovsky.
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