Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
It’s the month of June.
The wind’s blowing. It’s snowing.
White crepe myrtle flows.
Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
The infant pointing
his finger to the drawer,
awaits the word “knob”.
“Clear Dew” Ibuse is a poet fond of Japanese haiku.
~~~
Haiku
by “Wired Clues” Abe
On the lightning map,
strikes show with growing circles.
Hail slaps the window.
“Wired Clues” Abe is a poet of trad haiku.
~~~
An Auto Graveyard
by Aw “Curbside” Lee
Was it an auto graveyard of electric vehicles—
a suburb of Hangzhou, disused white cars in a green field?
Were these developed in high-techno Kandi factories?
Who will dispose of all those manufactured batteries?
Did they come from a sharing company that went bankrupt?
Was Microcity the green firm? Was its demise abrupt?
Are more and more of its bad products growing at this site,
like all of those unused and piled shared electric bikes,
deteriorating in ghost dystopian town spots,
there gathering up emptiness on growing vacant lots?
Aw “Curbside” Lee is a poet of Chinese industry.
~~~
Newsreel:
You gander at the news: jihadists kill kids at a school.
Again some ISIS thugs go forth to break the golden rule.
Ugandan heartaches r-o-i-l át more than three dozen dead.
Most of the boarding high-school students fast asleep in bed.
Th’ girls were hacked to death; the boys were burnt by arson flames.
Mpondwe’s massacre hit headlines: hate renews its claims.
~~~
One More Encounter
by Dicase Lebweru
“…snatched from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat…”
Phillis Wheatley, “To the…Earl of Dartmouth”
“Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing…”
Carl Sandburg, “Chicago”
She wants to laugh again, once more, in mother Africa,
to dance to drum-beats, shout and roar and shake with laughter’s caw.
She’s tired of the weeping; how she hates the groaning cries.
the loads of kwashiokered children, grave and grok good-byes.
She wants to laugh with brothers blaming her for breeding sons,
and daughters, o, preserving peace, and salesmen of guns.
She’s tired of the blood-stained earth wherever she may be,
the mad pursuit of money, hardened hearts, and vanity.
She wants strong sinews building cities, paved sidewalks and streets.
She’s tired of the looting, raping, bushman savagery.
She’s tired of the nightmare, this encounter with the base.
She wants the laughter, yes, hereafter, and the gift of grace.
Dicase Lebweru is a poet of East Africa. Phillis Wheatley (1753-1784) was a late Colonial American poet, Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) a Modernist American poet. Grace Akello is a contemporary Ugandan poet, from whom this dodeca takes its cues. Uganda is a nation of around 40,000,000, Mpondwe, Uganda, a city of around 50,000.
~~~
Marrow
by Aedile Cwerbus
He sang o’ th’ tilth of dirt-fill filth, of furrowed fields of earth,
of flocks and trees and honey bees—of such there was no dearth—
while stern Augustus lauched forth levin, lightning bolts of war;
as far as good Euphrates, he declared his bare rule o’er.
He, then, who knew Parthenope, the siren of the sea,
whose lovely songs could not beguile wise Odysseus,
wooed trailing woodlands on his floral ambles of sweet peace;
inglorious, he sang of shepherds and their fleecy sheep.
He sang of daily labours, in idyllic piety,
a panoramic agricultural variety,
in fine didactic verse, that he heroically made
beneath great blazing Helios and spreading beech tree’s shade.
Off Piedigrotta
by Aedile Cwerbus
Off Piedigrotta, Mergellina, Naples, Italy,
the traffic passes thin white safety barriers and tree,
rose-coloured oleander, poisonous, but beautiful,
beside the sidewalk, near the tunnel and high gray-aged wall.
There is a sign locating Vergil’s Tomb, as well as that,
of Leopardi, in this park, here at the black-barred gate.
Departing traffic flows, one takes the pathway’s slightest rise:
at left, a tall brick wall; black post top lights, lodged at the right.
Past climbing trees and myrtle hedges, one proceeds along,
up to a large white plaque, explaining what is further on:
a bust of youthful Vergil, nose-chipped, on white pedestal,
in ivy-covered, stone-arched niche, and base, embedded stall.
“Mantua gave me birth, Calabria took me away;
and now Parthenope holds me—who sang within his day
of pastures, farms and leaders. This is Vergil’s epitaph,
of the first century before the common era’s draft.”
Was this where Vergil would have liked to have his ashes placed?
Was this where Silius Italicus declaimed his grace?
Was this a tomb of pagan veneration with no nave?
Did this tomb have a bay tree at the entrance of the cave?
Aedile Cwerbus is a poet of Ancient Rome. Vergil (70 BC – 19 BC) was a Golden Age Roman poet who wrote, in addition to earlier verses, bucolics, georgics, and an epic. Silius Italicus was an epic poet of the Silver Age in Roman literature. Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) was a Romantic Italian poet.
~~~
Upon a Secret Mission
by Subcia Weedler
I saw him enter Naples. He was on a high-speed train.
He came into the Central Station’s pulmonary vein.
He walked past shops and restaurants, a ticket office too,
outside, in Garibaldi Plaza, a long taxi queue.
He made the trade, weighed thé parade, and then returned inside.
Back from his own Pompeii, up to the north now he would ride.
There was so much to do; he had to go through Italy;
like pompous Goethe, who had once sought light in Germany.
He was upon a secret mission no one cared to know;
and yet he had to do it all the same; he had to go.
Subcia Weedler is a poet of espionage. Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a noted German Romantic poet. Naples is a city in Italy of around 900,000.
~~~
Outside the Bode Museum
by Uwe Carl Diebes
It sits securely on the island in the Spree—
the Bode—like the giant prow of some great ship.
dividing river waters flowing past blue-grey.
One sees above the Florentine basilica,
a copper-coloured dome, Baroque in its design
by Ernst von Ihne, stout in his embellished grip.
At night its windows and its archways brightly shine
above the smooth and grey-blue, sprayless Spree’s dull sheen,
its art locked safely in. Not far off lies the line
of the Berliner Fernsehturm, which can be seen;
its base gleams like a sword’s long hilt, a white, thick blaze,
with red-and-blue-lit lance out from its turning orb.
Uwe Carl Diebes is a poet of Germany. Ernst von Ihne (1848-1917) was a noted German architect.
~~~
The Veteran in the Grocery Store
by War di Belecuse
Becoming an old fossil can be pretty frightening;
in fact, it can be petrifying—terror tightening,
like as the fearful dinosaurs of ancient periods,
a hundred million years ago in dreadful eerie muds,
became stone skeletons in time. He’s in the grocery,
the sev-en-ty-six-year-old-ve-ter-an of Germany.
Back in the 1960s, in the US Army Corps,
long after the Triassics and Jurassics joined Earth’s ores.
He says it only gets worse as one ages through the time.
One has to be courageous as one faces losing might.
War di Belecuse is a poet of the military.
~~~
The Astronomer by Johannes Vermeer
by Sir Bac de Leeuw
He sits beside the globe he’s turning with his hand.
One wonders, ‘Is it Antonie van Leeuwenhoek?’
It seems as if the world is at his command.
He holds his draped desk, spinning his celestial globe,
and contemplates it in the corner of the room
lit up beside a window, there above a book,
which seems to be by Metius, and opened to
a section saying inspiration comes from God.
Upon the wall there is a picture, if you zoom
in, finding Moses in the reeds. All is subdued,
the colours, lighting, mood, the furniture and man,
a moment taken from eternity—planned awe.
An Unmentioned Stop
by Sir Bac de Leeuw
Enroute to Amsterdam, upon the jet he had to go.
He had no choice, since he was there; he would go through Schiphol.
He had to blow through quickly, but he couldn’t skip it, no,
if he was going to make it to Rome—that shipping hole.
He reached the International Airport—untethered plans.
He had come down so low, and dropped into the Netherlands.
He grabbed his carry-ons and rolled them off to Charon’s boat,
he hoped would float up to the clouds o’er Middle Earth’s grand moat.
Like Jason, borne by Argonauts, who sought the Golden Fleece,
he sought to get to Italy once leaving Colchis beach.
Sir Bac de Leeuw is a poet of the Netherlands. Adriann Metius (1571-1635) was a Dutch geometer, astronomer, thus measurer. Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) was a Dutch Baroque painter. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) was a Dutch Microscopist, the first to observe protozoa and bacteria.
~~~
Newsreel:
Around four-hundred miles south of St. Johns, Newfoundland,
nine-hundred miles east of Cape Cod, in a sub-tub van,
in search of old Titanic in Atlantic Ocean depths,
in the tight-packed submersible sea-craft of little breadth,
five passengers lost contact with the surface ship dispatch.
O, it’s like finding one slim needle in a huge haystack.
Titanic still is taking lives a century beyond.
So many still are drawn to cataclysm’s kizmet dawn.
~~~
In the Eternal Tide
by Urbawel Cidese
They will not be there long—the yellow, brown-eyed Susan blooms
at the industrial site going up here now in June.
Their rough and hairy flowers tower at the boundary,
and cluster at the edge of the foundations, flourishing.
They add a momentary respite from the freeway stream,
beyond the concrete monument behind the warehouse screen.
And yet, their striking poses scattering about the air
contrast to th’ massive manufactured business-park and square.
They radiate before the excavators and the cranes,
drum cement mixers, rollers, dump-trucks, fork-lifts and their crates.
Beside the make-shift gate and grate of greatness, they abide,
like us, but for a little bit in the eternal tide.
Urbawel Cidese is a poet of urban spaces.
~~~
And Yet Predawn
by Waldeci Erebus
It is predawn. The night has yet to give up anything.
It is so quiet, o, quite silent, wanting whispering.
And yet, it is as worthy of a time as any is,
its stillness palpable, its dark, profound, fastidious.
One sees the street lamps and the house lights, stars across the sky.
One sees the headlights and the tail lights of a car pass by.
And yet, the many gradded shadows dominate the scene,
a momentary pause from histrionic solar mien.
Waldesi Erebus is a poet of the dark.
~~~
Thursday Afternoon, June 15th 2023
by “Wild” E. S. Bucaree
This wasn’t like the swirling killer Hank and Drover faced
and into Slim’s large cottonwood tree limbs were harshly placed.
The mobile phones went off with a tornado warning…then
debris and trees flew through the strong wind-shearing’s feared demesne.
First came the hail, golfball sized, then hard, white softball clumps;
that system then became a twister. A tornado struck:
four-hundred meters width; length, 1.6 kilometers;
forthcoming dread and horrid drop in the barometers.
In Perryton, north Texas, smashed, fragmented congeries
left three dead in its wake, more than a hundred injuries,
more than a hundred homes destroyed before its blasting spread.
A tanker truck was tossed…and off into a pasture set.
“Wild” E. S. Bucaree is a poet of Texas. Perryton, TX, has a population of around 8,000. This dodeca alludes to a writer from Perryton, Texas, John R. Erickson, contemporary writer of Hank the Cowdog.
~~~
Email From New Mexico
by Slade U. W. Bierce
It’s strange to get a message from a person of the past.
I wasn’t waiting for one, and yet here it has been cast.
And though this was pro forma, and not personally sent,
your last email that I got was 2017.
Still, oddly I was thinking of those missives we had aired;
because I bumped into the writer you had back then shared.
I’d never read Cormac MacCarthy, even heard of him;
but recently I bumped into his prose—Gawd, hardly mim.
He lingered round his characters of loWest quality,
subconsciously attempting greatness through intensity.
to meet the test for darkness, starkness, and sheer wretchedness.
So he’s the height, or depths, PostModernists think are the best?
Shade U. W. Bierce is a poet of the Southwest. According to Beau Lecsi Werd, “mim” is a neologism of many meanings. Cormac MacCarthy (1933-2023) was a PostModernist American novelist.
~~~
Newsreel:
Was some of the lab work in Wuhan done at his behest,
with the bequest of some grant money that came from Hotez?
Why would he dare debate the Democratic candidate,
to air talks with the controversial Robert Kennedy,
especi’lly since YouTube and Google censor him a lot,
and do not want such people challenging Big Pharma thought.
~~~
The Undertaker
by Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”
Though most of Earth has been investigated as of late,
he is from Parts Unknown that GPS can’t yet locate.
The problem is computer persons don’t know where he’s at,
since all they have is GPT, AI, and shit like that.
But Executioner, Ultimate Warrior, Smash and Ax,
Abyss, Berzerker, Papa Shango, Kane, and Battle Kat,
Giant Gonzalez, Mr. J. L., Suicide, and Doink,
were, too, from Parts Unknown, like the Destroyer, Missing Link.
Then who ‘s this bard who writes shit-tons of prosy poetry?
Is he the Undertaker facing new hostilities,
who ‘s being overtaken by life’s possibilities—
from Parts Unknown—not Anthony Bourdin—Just who is he?
Rudi E. Welec, “Abs”, is a poet of sport. Anthony Bourdin (1956-2018) was an American chef.
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