Haiku
by “Lice Brews” Ueda
In May’s blasting rains,
one thing remains unhidden—
pounding, pouring rain.
Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
On a growing branch,
a scissor-tail is settling—
a bright spring morning.
Haiku
by Ibe Ware Desu, LC
A white egret rounds
Louisiana rice fields
searching for frog leaps.
“Lice Brews” Ueda, “Clear Dew” Ibuse, and Ibe Ware Desu, LC, are haiku writers. Scissor-tail is short for scissor-tailed flycatcher. These three haikus draw upon the seminal work of Matsuo Basho (1644-1694).
~~~
The Rise of China’s Ozone-Depleting CFC Gas
by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei
Another study has confirmed which was already known,
that China’s shredding th’ ozone layer largely on its own.
How much it’s heating up the Earth is really hard to tell,
but can create an ultraviolet-streamed screaming hell.
Matt Rigby, atmospheric chemist at the U of B,
said Shandong and Hebei are sources of the CFC.
The study is definitive, says Melbourne’s Ian Rae;
so HURRY UP PLEASE IT IS TIME to halt ozone decay.
Co-author Sunyoung Park, a geochemist in Daegu,
hopes that the Chinese government will do, will do, will do.
Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is a poet of China. U of B is the University of Bristol in England. CFC stands for chlorofluorocarbon. It was supposed to have been phased out by 2010 by the Montreal protocol; but since 2013, China has disregarded the treaty and CFC has been rising dramatically in northeastern China.
~~~
Rare Earths
by Rauc E. Sedilube
The rare earth elements are used in many product lines,
jet engines, smart phones, lasers, missiles, cars, and satellites.
Rare earths include ytterbium and gadolinium,
europium, dysprosium, and neodymium,
praseodymium, samarium, and terbium,
lutetium, promethium, and also erbium,
there’s yttrium and scandium, and likewise holmium,
along with lathanum and cerium, there’s thulium.
Till ’48, rare earths came from Brazil and India;
but in the 1950s most came from South Africa;
from ’60s to the ’80s California was the top;
but now today it’s China that produces at a clop.
Rauc E. Sedilube is a poet of geology. Though China has approximately 36% of rare earth reserves, in 2017 it had produced 81% of the World’s production, with Australia second at 15%. This week the value of rare earth stocks soared. Who knows what that will bring to future markets?
~~~
A Western Australian Instant
by Walibee Scrude
The ocher earth extends to the horizon’s industry,
where tall transmission towers carry electricity.
Beneath vast clouds that cross the sky, are smaller man-made clouds,
in manufacturing or mining, making wispy shrouds.
A single, loaded truck is being driven down a road,
a flattened, track-worn trail in shades of red and brown and gold.
Against a giant universe, a backdrop vast and grand,
the driver drives his truck along that massive blast of land.
Where is he going? Where is he? What does he carry there?
Three wires cross above a dirt road. What load must they bear?
On a Young Australian Blogger and Novelist
by Walibee Scrude
He stood beside a picket fence along a shaded road,
a young man holding up a pup, a brown and gentle load.
He wore a Michael Jordan jersey, number twenty three,
beneath the branching limbs of some tall shadow-making tree.
Aggressive and creative, eating worlds with his mind,
he launched his Jason Dark in Midas, fighting hard, with spine,
against the sons of Chaos, threatening the World’s end,
maniacal, apocalyptic, st-riding to the end.
He lives in Brisbane, challenging his preconceptions with
the boundaries of his ambitions and a bit of myth.
Walibee Scrude is a poet fond of Australia. The first poem is a Freo art pic, the second one is of Chris Nicholas.
~~~
A Meditation
by Sri Wele Cebuda
I saw a man beside a shack, up sitting in the air,
above the rain-wet, wooden platform. How could he be there?
It was as if some hard, harsh god had lifted him on high,
suspended in the lotus pose, afloat against the sky.
His legs and black athletic shoes remained above the ground.
I wondered how the man was ever going to get down.
But he did not look all that happy. He seemed discontent.
What good was rising on the sky, if all one did was vent?
But there he hung in drab-green vest, the play thing of some god,
unhappy as the day is long, but floating-lotus awed.
Perhaps he meditated on some gorgeous, mighty thing
that brought some kind of satisfaction. But what did it bring?
Perhaps he felt like he was meeting his god face to face.
But, o, why would one ever put oneself in such a place?
High as the scraggly trees, above the platform made of wood,
I wished the god who held him there would be a bit subdued,
not beat the hell out of him there, and toss him to the ground.
I wished the god who held him there would keep him safe and sound.
For, o, it was amazing just to gaze on such a sight,
a man up floating in the air, but there without delight.
Sri Wele Cebuda is a poet of spiritual things. When he was younger, he would have dreams of flying above the countryside, on his back with his ankles crossed.
~~~
The Rod Al-Farag Axis Bridge
by Alec Subre Wide
The Rod al-Farag Axis Bridge, across the Cairo Nile,
is over 67 meters wide, suspension style,
the World’s widest, just completed, with a dozen lanes,
160 cables is the number of them it contains.
540 meters long, the towers 90 meters high
rise up into the pale blue and late May, open sky.
Pedestrian side-passageways have panoramic views,
glass-flooring, see-through walks allow for some sight-seeing tours.
With 20,000,000 people, Cairo’s networks need relief;
those caught in traffic jams there will be glad for any ease.
Alec Subre Wide is a poet of bridges between places and people, between points and positions. The longest bridge over continuous water that he’s ever seen is that in Louisiana, the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway.
~~~
Internet Blogger and Poet Charlie Priest
by Edwe Bleca Ruís
“All life is crazy, man.”
—”Weird” Ace Blues
His life is crazy; it’s amazing how insane he is;
and yet there’s something quite humane in his inane B.S.
The dude reminds me of my flaws and how to live with them
within the rhythm of his rhymes, his loves, his flaws, his phlegm..
His self-taught English resonates; he talks about his life;
he talks about whatever hé wants, struggles, dreams or strife,
from ladies, mom, and Spanish legion, crime, and shit-hole room,
a whirl of words around him swirls, a dust storm in a doom.
He’s plagued by drink, insomnia and smoking cigarettes,
and yet despite it all, he is the frostiest of gents.
Edwe Bleca Ruís is a poet of Spain.
~~~
After Turner’s Tintern Abbey
by Beau Ecs Wilder
The vaulting arches, covered with ivy,
leap through th’ airy region’s of nature’s church.
The congregation once large and lively
is supplanted by the chirping bird’s perch.
This building surely once held grand power,
a symbol of life’s glorious spirit,
a fearsome and formidable tower—
the more impressive when one was near it.
But even now the edges seem to fade
in morning’s glare, like leafy ghosts fleeing,
or something civilization mislaid
that the tourists hardly deign worth seeing;
and only th’ occasional visitor
finds or sees in it what he’s looking for.
Beau Ecs Wilder is a poet and art critic of the 19th century. A lover of beauty, his ekphrastic poetry strives to capture in verse some of the qualities found in the paintings he revisions. J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851) was a Romantic British painter.
~~~
Claude Elwood Shannon
by Euclidrew Base
He juggled engineering theory veering into math,
a pioneer in taking logic down a switching path,
by using Boolean to represent the circuitry
of telephones, and new electrical technology.
He was an information source. He had a message too.
He wanted to transmit it past the noise that round him flew.
He waited for receivers who could pick his signal up,
despite the entropy he found round swirling in his cup.
He longed to reach the resolution of uncertainty,
the negative recriprocal of probability.
Euclidrew Base is a poet of mathematics. Claude Elwood Shannon (1916-2001) founded digital circuit design theory in his master’s thesis which showed universal computation was attained with a mixture of switches and boolean gates.
~~~
Redefined Kilogram
by Ira “Dweeb” Scule
The kilogram, mass basic unit, has been redefined,
with the Parisian metal cylinder no more aligned.
It’s now defined by the Planck constant’s quantum quantity;
no longer will a hunk of metal form its entity.
As well, there will be other definitions, that is sure,
the kelvin, which is the main unit of temperature,
then too, the unit of electric current, the ampere,
and mole, the unit for amount of substance, crystal clear.
Now many scientists desire redefining time;
new cesium atomic clocks are more precise and prime.
Ira “Dweeb” Scule is a poet of science. Max Planck (1858-1947) discovered the quantum of action, Planck’s constant, in 1900. Though the World has gone metric, all over the World one can find, for example, English (Imperial) measures, in different places and contexts, televisions, pints of beer, cooking ingredients, yards in sports, human measurements, clothing, moving furniture around, tire parts, car speeds, rulers, etc. Knowing more than one system, like knowing more than one language, can be beneficial to the mind, say, moving back and forth between kilograms and pounds, or just piling rocks on a seesaw to figure out a body’s weight in stone! Those who only see one way in anything miss out on the potential possibilities the Universe presents. Although right-handed, when Mr. Scule was in England, he wrote only with his left hand, and when he was in Germany, he used only binary numbers in all his personal writing. It does a body good to change things up a bit. When Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949, its citizens drove on the left; within two weeks trucks and cars were driven on the right. When French academicians got on their kick of tens, in numbers, the metric system, etc., the great mathematician LaGrange, perhaps tongue in cheek, suggested people would actually have to think if their numbers were in elevens or thirteens instead of tens.
~~~
Around the Globe
by War di Belecuse
Around the Globe, where’er one looks, or goes, one hears of wars,
the whispers and the rumours fly, like the brisk winds of Mars.
They cannot be ignored, because they will not go away.
One hears of them in morning light and as the evening fades.
Around the Globe, whene’er one closes one’s eyes, one still hears;
the whispers and the rumours swirl beneath the turning stars.
They can’t be faced, because they are so devastating—hard.
Still one hears them at night or day. One has to keep one’s guard.
Around the Globe, up in the air, one dare not stare. Who knows
what might not hit you in your eyes, or hit you in your soul?
War di Belecuse is a poet of wars, in Northeast Asia, in Southeast Asia and Oceania, in Southern Asia, in West-Central Asia and Russia, in Africa, in Europe, and the Americas, South and North—around the Globe.
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