Haiku
          by “Lice Brews” Ueda

Cicadas at dusk,
chattering in the hot air,
penetrate my ears.

“Lice Brews” Ueda is a haiku poet of the insect world.

~~~

Haiku
          by E “Bird Caws” Eule

It dives through the air,
devouring winged insects.
O, swallow, swallow.

E “Bird Caws” Eule is a haiku poet of birds. “O, swallow, swallow” echoes Tennyson, Gilbert, T. S. Eliot, and classical Greek and Latin.

~~~

Haiku
          by “Wired Clues” Abe

The large jetliner,
descends, from huge clouds and sky,
seeming touchable.

“Wired Clues” Abe is a haiku poet of technology.

~~~

Hong Kong Protesters Arrested
          by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei

More than four dozen people were arrested in Hong Kong
protesting China’s new security and plotted law.
Though silently assembling, peaceful and solicitous,
unlike Antifa and the BLM in the US.
some fifty-plus were charged disrupting, blocking city streets.
Protesting is a hate-crime claim the Communist police.
They do not countenance the freedom to speak openly.
They want to censor anybody daring to be free.
They do not care to hear opposing view-points from the mass.
They want to turn Hong Kong into a prison cell, alas.

Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is a poet of China.

~~~

The Woman I Intend to Visit
          by Li “Sacred Bee” Du

The woman I intend to visit lives behind the door
that I will soon be entering. I stand here right before
its whiteness with a gold-rimmed window, gleaming in the sun.
She’s planted tiny flowers in white plastic ovals on
the wooden railing painted white. Th’ alyssum are in bloom.
The door knob’s gold. I slowly open it. An open room
appears. She sits upon a sofa watching television. Hey,
how are you doing? what’s been going on? how was your day?
We talk until we have no more to say. We are content
to make our visit brief; and yet to sat is my intent..

Li “Sacred Bee” Du is a poet fond of Chinese literature.

~~~

The Katyn Massacre
          by Ludiew E, Sarceb

So long ago—who thinks about it now? It had occurred
in 1940. That was that¬—the Katyn Massacre.
mass executions—more than 20,000 Poles were killed,
intelligensia and officers were murdered, stilled.
So long ago—who thinks about it now? Perhaps the Poles;
the NKVD murdered over 20,000 souls.
The Russian Communists had murdered, as a stratagem,
those who would not accept USSR control of them.
So long ago—who thinks about it now? It’s hard to say.
It is so hard to say, and yet, it must be said—today.

Ludiew E. Sarceb is a poet of Poland. Poland’s ambassador to Washington Piotr Wilczek said he was “disgusted and appalled” by “acts of vandalism” committed against the statues of Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746-1817) and Casimir Pulaski (1745-1779) in the United States’ capital.

~~~

San Juan de la Cruz
          by El Cid E. W. Rubesa

Born of a humble birth in 1542,
he, San Juan de la Cruz, attended the schools of
the Jesuits, the sick, the suffering, the blue.
He was a lover of the night and Christ’s deep love.
He entered Carmelite Santa Theresa’s group
and went to Salamanca—blue sky high above—
as one of the discalced, without sandal or boot.
Imprisoned in Toledo in a dark cell
for his reforms, a cruel time of solitude,
he there composed his poems, an escape from hell,
renouncing all the world he knew well for the true,
that mystic edge of life beyond which none can tell.

El Cid E. W. Rubesa is a poet of El Siglo de Oro. San Juan de la Cruz (1542-1591) was a poet of El Siglo de Oro, the poem is a bilding [sic].

~~~

Longyearbyen
          by Icee U Swelbard

Longyearbyen, Longyear Town, the largest Swalbard settlement:
two thousand people plus live in this freezing element.
As such, it is the World’s northernmost community
of more than but one-thousand souls. They are not lunatics.
They love the Sun, as do the wild animals revealed,
like reindeer, arctic foxes, polar bears and thick-skinned seals.
Named after John Munro Longyear, who started mining coal,
quite an adventure then, more than a century ago.
Today most mining ‘s gone to Sveagruva to the east,
no permanent inhabitants, the nature of the beast.

Icee U Swelbard is a poet of the Arctic, including Spitzbergen. His favourite literary character from Spitzbergen is Spitz, Buck’s chief foe in Jack London’s “Call of the Wild”. John Munro Longyear (1850-1922) was an American entrepreneur.

~~~

America’s Poetic Drama’s Height
          by Cause Bewilder
          “Tho Eliot knew drama more than any Modernist,
          his dramas never reached poetic spired magnificence..”
              —B. S. Eliud Acrewe

Born in Columbus, Mississippi of neurotic mom,
Edwina, and an alcoholic dad, Cornelius,
he wrote around the time of World War II’s maelstrom,
with dramatists like Miller, Wilder, and Eugene O’Neill—
and brought his prose poetic dramas to America,
including Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
The Night of the Iguana, Suddenly Last Summer, and
The Glass Menagerie, Sweet Bird of Youth, A Rose Tattoo,
Tennessee Williams fell through hell’s nightmarish realms and mess,
like Orpheus descending through Shakespearean abyss.

Cause Bewilder is a poet of the South, British-American dramatist T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) was a literary critic and inspited essayiat on Elizabethan drama—the height of poetic drama in the English language. Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), Thornton Wilder (1897-1975), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), and Arthur Miller (1918-2005) were Modernist American dramatists.

~~~

Driving Down the Freeway: July 1, 2020
          by Bruc “Diesel” Awe
          “…a savage servility slides by on grease…”
              —Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead”

Here—in the blinding, blazing sunlight—I can hardly see,
while driving down the freeway almost automatic’lly
Robotic’lly I pass the signs, but only read their flare;
the numbers too are hard to figure out in such a glare.
What am I doing here? I have somewhere I need to be.
But this seems very dangerous, not least of all to me.
The cars and trucks rush past, there is no scrimping on the speed;
in fact, the frenzied driving seems to be a dire need.
So many have so many places that they need to be,
here where there’s hardly any true or real civilitity.

Bru “Diesel” Awe is a poet of transportation.

~~~

Michael Shellenberger’s Apology
          by Ira “Dweeb” Scule

For his part in the climate scare of these last thirty years,,
that caused so many on the planet to have frenzied fears,
the writer Michael Shellenberger has apologized.
The activist environmentalist has realized
humanity’s not causing a “sixth mass extinction”—no.
The Amazon is not “the World’s lungs”. This is not so.
Disasters are not made worse by the constant climate change,
which will occur no matter what, he goes on to explain.
And fires have declined about some 25%;
wood fuel and houses cause more damage when such fires vent.

In richer lands emitted carbon is declining, and,
since 1970, in Britain, Germany and France.
Adapting to below sea level helped make Holland rich.
As Earth gets hotter, more food is produced in bog and ditch.
The biggest threats to wildlife are poaching and land loss;
wood fuel is worse than fossel fuel for animals and us.
Preventing new pandemics will require more, not less,
of agriculture industry. It helps the planet—yes.
He bases his claims on the facts he patiently has gleaned
from FAO, IUCN, and the IPCC.

He goes on, in his lengthy book, 400 pages long,
to note that factories and modern farming make us strong.
He thinks the most important thing for saving planet Earth
is the production of more meat and food upon less dirt.
He thinks it’s best to move from wood to coal, petroleum,
to natural gas, and, surprisingly, uranium.
Renewables require too much land for energy.
Farms, power plants and cities should have greater density.
He thinks that vegetarian emission-dropping fails;
and switching to petroleum and palm oil saved the whales.

He thinks that “free-range” beef requires twenty times more land,
producing more emissions, not a point on which to stand.
He thinks that Greenpeace dogmatism wasn’t helpful and
has worsened forest fragmentation of the Amazon.
He thinks gorilla conservation in the Congo has
resulted in the killing of 250 elephants.
Environment alarmists are Malthusian, he states;
debunked for centuries, such thought continues its mistakes.
The evidence is overwhelming, he goes on to say,
more energy is better than less energy today.

Ira “Dweeb” Scule is a poet of science. Michael Shellenberger has been an environmental activist for decades. As of this date, the coronavirus plague has killed 500,000 and disrupted millions of lives and livelihoods. Acronyms used include FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization), IUCN (the International Union for the Conservation of Nature) and IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Surprisingly, 19th century economists, like Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and Karl Marx (1818-1893) still have a great number of follwers in the 21st century: the former, by the back to nature and the farm group, the latter, by the brutal state-police crowd.

~~~

Beneath the Sparkling Stars
          by Usa W. Celebride

While this America devolves into vulgarity,
its heritage becoming little more than heresy,
and thickening so heavily into a bubbling mass
of bullying, mobocracy, and mindless, molten gas,
I still remember how the flower fades to fruit and earth;
out of the mother comes another from another birth.
You will recall when cities lie right at the monster’s feet,
there still are fruited plains and mountains to which one can flee.
Despite the savage, fierce servility in streets and cars,
shine, perishing republic here beneath the sparkling stars.

Usa W. Celebride is a poet of America. The poet he is drawing mainly from is Modernist American poet Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962).