Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
Left and right, he stalks,
an iguana on the rocks.
An old baby crawls.
“Clear Dew” Ibuse is a poet of natural settings and Japanese poetic forms.
~~~
Haiku
by “Wired Clues” Abe
A green, plastic frog
plops in the baby’s bath tub:
the sound of water.
“Wired Clues” Abe is a poet using Japanese forms united with technology. The phrase “the sound of water” in Japanese is “mizu no oto”—水の音.
~~~
Newsreel:
Pelosi’s visit to Taipei, Taiwan, released Xi’s ire;
he said that they will perish who will dare to play with fire;
but she said that America stands with Taiwan today,
that robust, vibrant, democratic nation where she stayed.
~~~
Taipei 101
by Aw “Curbside” Lee
Some say the Taipei 101
looks like a bamboo stalk,
while others say it looks just like
a Chinese takeout stacked.
I tend to favor those that think
it’s boxed food from a wok,
because its sides are sloped and straight
not curvy or shellacked.
Its spire, which rises sixty feet,
is like a bamboo’s height;
though it lacks leaves or small birds’ feet,
it’s narrow, straight, upright.
Now others say it’s based upon
the look of a pagoda,
while others think it’s Star Wars fare
in which one could find Yoda.
And others yet think it is like
a stack of Chinese ingots,
one piled upon another one,
a symbol of abundance.
The tower’s planned design is based
upon a group of eights.
Upon eight columns there are placed
eight upward flaring crates;
and in each crate there are eight floors,
above the twenty-five,
which is exactly sixty-four,
to make up eighty-nine.
One-hundred-one floors climb above
the five floors in the ground.
The bottom is where shoppers shove
you if you hang around.
Aw “Curbside” Lee is a poet of Taiwanese architecture. One of the World’s tallest buildings, Taipei 101 is about 508 meters high.
~~~
Newsreel:
One of the 9-11 plotters, drone-struck in Kabul,
Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed on his balcony.
~~~
Ethiopian Distress
by Luwe Risc Abede
His skin was copper brown, a yellow, shiny amber tone,
in desert camouflage with tints of amber, gold and roan.
O, he was stationed in the shadow of a giant rock,
his silver hair and dogtags dangling under Sun and hawk.
He crouched, anticipating someone coming round the bend.
He was alert to touch and sound. He did not want the end.
O, how he wanted to be ready for the reckoning,
but he knew too that he himself was barren beckoning.
The enemy was all around. He’d need to be prepared.
He pulled his belt up thoughtfully. He was alive and scared.
Luwe Risc Abede is a poet of Ethiopia. Fighting between Tigray forces and the federal government of Ethiopia have been ongoing since 3 November 2020.
~~~
In This Middle Age
by Adile E. Cwerbus
In 410 A D, Rome had been taken
by barbarians led by Alaric,
sending shock waves through the empire, shaking
the fiber of the aristocracy.
Even in Hippo, in North Africa,
wealthy citizens showed up, still quaking,
and one Pelagius, an ascetic,
speaking about Rome’s moral laxity.
This radical monk, in his forsaking
some ideas, became a heretic.
He thought original sin not tainting,
divine grace not required. This noncleric
stirred up a hornet’s nest against him, in-
cluding Hippo’s Bishop, Saint Augustine,
who twenty years later in 430
A D at the age of seventy-five,
hung still on as the Bishop of Hippo,
with Vandals at the gates, barely alive,
doing his very best to help prop up
manly spirit in that city of man,
eating the hard bread, gulping down the cup
of sharp wine, awaiting the Arian.
He entered the city of God just as
hate-mongers were tearing down Hippo’s walls.
His collapse before Geiseric’s justice
and the brutality of the Vandals
mark the end of the classical era…
forever—“hoc interim seculo.”
Adile E. Cwerbus is a poet of Ancient Rome. Alaric (c. 370 – c. 410) was the first king of the Visigoths. Hippo (present day Annaba) was the capital of the Vandal kingdom from 435-439. Annaba is a city in Algeria of approximately 460,000. Pelagius (354-418) was a British monk and thinker, who stressed the primacy of the human effort in spiritual salvation. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was one of the last great philosophers of ancient Rome, and whose views on language, skepticism, knowledge, will, the emotions, sin, grace, freedom, determinism, sexuality, the human mind, and his spirit of relentless inquiry mark him as the first of the philosophers of “the Middle Ages”. Arius (256-336) was a presbyter of ancient Alexandria, Egypt. Geiseric (428-477) was a creator of the kingdom and a king of the Vandals. According to “Crude” Abe Lewis, “hoc interim seculo” is a Latin phrase that means “in this middle age”.
~~~
Four Painters at the End of the Middle Ages
by Buceli da Werse
Cimabue, a Florentine painter
of the 13th Century, drew his style
from that of Byzantine art, fainter,
less flat, more golden, less iconic, while
Duccio, to the south in Siena,
followed along in a similar way,
adding new light, in yellow and henna,
heavenly ‘mbued, brilliant as the Dawned Day;
Giotto came with his novel sense of space,
to Arno, sculptural and full of life,
with greater flow of feeling in the face,
a brighter show of meaning in the strife;
Simone, the Sienese most touched by
the Gothic, succinctly expressed in works
that were dazzling and troubling to the eye,
thus painting what inspires and that which irks.
Buceli da Werse is a poet of Italy. Cimabue (1240 – 1302), Duccio (c. 1255 – c. 1319), Giotto (c. 1267 – 1337), and Simone (c. 1284 – 1344) were four Italian painters of the late Middle Ages. Florence is a city of Italy of about 380,000, and Siena, of about 50,000. Florence lies on the Arno, a river in Italy.
~~~
Largo al Factotum
by Ewald E. Icebruc
The “Largo al Factotum” from “The Barber of Seville”
is sung in the first entrance by the servant Figaro.
The constant singing of eighth-notes in 6/8 meter time,
allegro and vivace is indeed a mighty feat.
Tongue-twisting lines insisting on superlatives have made
it a pièce de résistance for a baritone’s display.
Rossini’s aria is in C major with great change,
from D3 to G4, with a high tessatura range,
th’ utmost precision in arpeggi, and Italian lain.
Sterbini wrote the fun libretto, famous to this day.
Händel’s Flug
by Ewald E. Eisbruc
Seemingly imitative of the sound
of chickens fluttering all about in
a herky-jerky motion, nowhere bound,
in a coop, a gold, feathery fountain
of clucking and pecking is Händel’s Flug
of 1742, Concerto
Grosso Opus 6 Number 7, Fugue,
a veritable avian scherzo.
The fox outside stirring up such noises
from a single subject’s note near his face,
and who has started this wild goose chase,
sends forth, in th’ exposition, the voices,
the alto, soprano, tenor and bass.
Such yellow fellows, cellos, and choices.
Ewald E. Eisbruc is a poet and music critic. Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792-1868) was an Italian Romantic composer. Cesare Sterbini (1784-1831) was an Italian Romantic poet and librettist. Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759) was a Baroque British-German composer.
~~~
Watering the Dry and Dying Grasses
by Uwe Carl Diebes
He loved to water plants when water stores were plentiful,
to hose the roses and the grass, beneath luftwaffe planes,
to hose the yard, the edging hedges, and the trees, in shorts,
especi’lly on hot days of 38° or more.
He loved to spray the water in large, shallow, curving arcs
upon the dry and dying grasses, golden, gray and stark.
He longed to perk them up with water dripping to their roots.
He thought such was so beautiful, to feed their thirsty shoots.
He thought of Ray Bradbury’s story “There Will Come Soft Rains”,
and dreamed that he was aiding nature with his drizzling drains.
Waiting For the Train
by Uwe Carl Diebes
He drank a cup of coffee, as he was beside the track.
He stood there waiting for the train, the station at his back.
He stood there in anticipation for the train to come.
He heard the bell. He heard the horn. He heard the distant thrum.
He stayed behind the yellow line. He looked off to the right.
For him it would be wunderbar to see the longed for sight.
O, he was heading off to Stuttgart from his Heilbronn home.
He was excited, o, he felt time going in slo-mo.
The squeaking brakes, his heartfelt ache, the choo-choo-choo-choo-choo—
here came the engine and the cars, the clanking and the swoosh.
It was not like as he was leaving a lovely, healing well;
but rathe about to ride warhorses into Hell.
Uwe Carl Diebes is a poet of German predilections. On Wednesday July 27, 2022, around 20,000 ground staff, counter staff, and aircraft technicians struck at Lufthansa, causing the company to cancel flights of over 130,000 passengers. Ray Bradbury (1920-2012) was a Postmodernist American writer. Stuttgart is a city in Germany of about 630,000 and Heilbronn is a city of about 125,000.
~~~
Le Tombeau d’ Edgar Poe
by Waldeci Erebus
The tomb of Edgar Allen Poe is a
rectangular, black, granite slab of stone
beyond the mountains of the moon, in space.
It stands in total emptiness, alone.
The distance from that place to this is vast.
It is impossible to reach or touch;
because it is forever in the past.
It is a surface which one cannot clutch.
It is too smooth to hold. It slides away,
amidst the stars and through eternity,
tomorrow turning to yes, yesterday,
while inching onward down infinity…
Waldeci Erebus is a poet of tombs. Edgar Poe (1809-1849) was a Romantic American poet.
~~~
Censoring in These Epoch Times
by Caud Sewer Bile
Eliza Bleu, a trafficking survivor found out how
political free speech can be attacked by Twitter’s crowd.
On Thursday after interviewing, she found out that she
could not click on the link to her talk, due to censoring.
Her enemy, the human traffickers, want her suppressed;
they pressed the Twitter crowd to keep her story from the press.
It’s not surprising that that US company would strike
malicious content in a news source that they do not like,
especi’lly one that doesn’t kowtow to some marxist line,
so deep in human trafficking in these most epoch times.
Caud Sewer Bile is a poet of yellow journalism.
~~~
Newsreel:
Now Wikipedia, in lock step with the thought police,
will try to make one definition of recession cease.
Julius Shiskin had it wrong according to their site;
it’s not two negative growth quarters. How could that be right?
The Ministry of Truth will try to set the record straight,
and lock their pages on recession so they can’t be changed.
Julius Shiskin (1912-1978), a 20th century American economist, does not have a Wikipedia article on his life and work.
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