Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
The bumblebee shakes
pollen from anthers of the
bittersweet flower.
“Clear Dew” Ibuse is a haikuist of the natural world. One of his favourite British naturalists and contemporay documentarians is David Attenborough.
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Haiku
by “Wired Clues” Abe
Incessant heat waves
activate the cicadas,
nature’s wind-up toy.
Haiku
by “Wired Clues” Abe
At the drive-thru bank,
waiting, idling, looping thru
Sam Outlaw’s “Ghost Town”.
“Wired Clues” Abe is a trad haiku writer, following on the work of writers, such as Nakamura Kusatao (1901-1983), Kaneko Tôta (1919-2018), Nagata Kôi (1900-1997), Nakamura Sonoko (1911-2001), and Akao Tôshi (1925-1981). Sam Outlaw is a contemporary SoCal singer and song writer.
~~~
Haiku
by “Lice Brews” Ueda
A stray monk comes in
to sip his green, morning tea:
a mute flowering.
“Lice Brews” Ueda is a haikuist fond of Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), though here he has in mind Edo poet and proset Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694).
~~~
His Cup of Tea
by Carb Deliseuwe
He did not want to spill his tea; he held it gingerly,
in his white cup, a green tea macha, flavoured ginger peach.
He didn’t want to see some steamy surplus water pour
down on the cool, dark-brown and hickory, smooth, hardwood floor.
He brought it to his desk and sipped its warmth and gentle taste;
it wasn’t something that he wanted…anyway…to waste.
He brought it to his lips again—again, again, again—
enjoying fresh scents through his nasolabial domain.
Carb Deliseuwe is a poet of food and drink. The nasolabial triangle is sometimes referred to as the danger triangle.
~~~
A Prosepoem on Discovering Dinosaur Eggs a Century Ago
by Bud “Weasel” Rice
“Always there has been an adventure just around the corner…”
—Roy Chapman Andrews
Director of th’ American Museum of Natural History, Roy Chapman Andrews went off to the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. He used a caravan of camels and a fleet of Dodges. For five long years, he and his team searched the bleak landscape, retreating to Beijing in winter months. Not only was that hard land’s climate harsh; but in the 1920s, brutal bandits roamed the world round the Flaming Cliffs of Shabarakh Usu. George Olson showed the skeptical Roy, when they combed, in 1923, those brilliant orange cliffs some oviraptor’s ring of eggs, its nest and home[though taking fifty years of scientific ifs]. Mongolia is a nation between Russia and China of around 3,300,000.
Bud “Weasel” Rice is a poet of Animalia. Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960) was a Modernist American explorer and naturalist; and George Olson, a member of the AMNH team, found the first egg.
~~~
Six Lines
by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei
“It’s Malabar!”
—D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner”
It needed to be taken off for true security;
preferring some hypocrisy to too much honesty.
The unofficial Hong Kong anthem for democracy,
has been removed from Spotify and iTunes—luckily.
A laughing Buddha in a robe, obese, abeam, and bald,
is fishing under a “shake money tree”, a Malabar.
Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is a poet of con-temporary China. D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) was a Modernist British poet and proset. Pachira aquatica is a tropical wetlands tree.
~~~
Newsflash:
He said that Putin’s “clearly losing the war in Iraq”.
What does Joe Biden know about the angle of attack?
~~~
The Rainbow
by Israel W. Ebecud
Whenever it appears up in the clouds I will see it,
remembering it as an everlasting covenant,
between our God and every living creature on the Earth
of every kind and every sum, abundancy or dearth.
The above quatrain draws on “Genesis 9:16” of Moses (c. 14th BC – c. 13th BC), an Archaic Hebrew author.
To the Jew
by Israel W. Ebecud
“—both to the Jew first, and to the Greek.”
—the Apostle Paul
The twelve disciples of Jesus were Matthew,
brothers James and John, Simon Peter, and Andrew,
Alphaeus’ son James, Thaddeus, and Bartholomew,
Philip, Thomas, Simon, and Judas. That is quite a few.
Israel W. Ebecud is a poet of Israel. The Greek writer, Apostle Paul (c. 5 – c. 65), is also known as Saul of Tarsus.
~~~
Newsflash:
Enroute to Moscow from Ukraine, Yevgeny Prigozhin,
called off his troops and left to Belarus, his ego preened.
~~~
Faded Fate
by Ercules Edibwa
A single metaphor from all his plays
with words is what remains of Choerilus;
and all that’s left of all his faded lays
is less than one would find in one chorus.
The bones and veins of earth are little more
than rocks and rivers. Flying over them,
above, a mighty eagle starts to soar
in circles far away. Its strategem
is to espy a target on the ground,
and drop its captive tortoise, breaking it
upon a bald and barren stone, big, round,
then diving down, shell broken, taking it
up in its beak to eat, to spill its guts.
If it could, it would as soon as kill us.
Ercules Edibwa is a poet of Ancient Greece. Choerilus (fl. c. 510 BC) was an Ancient Greek tragic poet, author of dramas, like Alope.
~~~
On Last Observing a Translation Of Georgica
by Aedile Cwerbus
When last observing a translation of Georgica
(made decades back, in England, far from North America),
like Keats and Clarke had done with Chapman’s Homer long ago,
or conqueror Cortéz when he set eyes on Mexico,
I finally could see the light found in Vergilius,
like Hershel had, when he had seen the light of Úranus,
enchanting with its epical idyllic pastorelles,
its flame came shining through the words of poet Robert Wells,
read by John Robbins, while I rested on my sofa’s breadth,
and, silent, listened to the phone, far from Balboa’s death.
Aedile Cwerbus is a poet of Ancient Rome. Figures in the poem, include British writers John Keats (1795-1821), Charles Cowden Clarke (1787-1877), and George Chapman (c. 1559-1634); Spanish explorers, Vasco Nuñez de Balboa (c. 1475-1519) and Hernán Cortéz (1485-1547); British Astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822); British actor John Franklyn Robbins (1924-2009); and contemporary British poet and translator Robert Wells. The word “pastorelles” is used here, via contemporary American poet John Taggart, not Medieval French songs between knights and ladies.
~~~
Cincinnati
by Wilbur Dee Case
Begun after the Revolutionary War,
named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
(who left all to preserve the republic—no more!
then returned to his farm), it, with great afflatus,
grew, on the Ohio’s banks, between the Little
and Great Miami Rivers, after hiatus.
By 1820, with the steamboat’s arrival,
it became Ohio’s largest city (throughout
the 1800s, a top ten U. S. city),
which slaughtered hogs and packaged pork for North and South,
published McGuffeys for national consumption,
and, though it disdained the trains, helped the Underground.
Cincinnati, not without sin, nor corruption,
a basin in an amphitheatre of hill,
once bossed by George Cox, now circled by construction,
Highway 275, and suburban spill—
(Blue Ash, White Oak, Wyoming, and Norwood,
Cheviot, Northbrook, Madeira, and Sharonville,
Springdale, Forest Park, Montgomery, and Mitford,
like those from Ohio, and these from Kentucky,
Covington, Forts Wright, Thomas, and Mitchell, Newport),
home to the first pro baseball team, the Red Stockings,
this soap maker, machine tooler, player of cards,
fifty miles west of the Serpent Mound—by hawk wings.
Wilbur Dee Case is a nondescript poet and literary critc of the normal and the bland, influenced by movement poets, such as Larkin, minimalist poets, such as Buson, reticent poets such as Dickinson, and hermetic poets, such as Montale. He loves the middle of the road, from flat Nebraska to ordinary New Jersey—his gasoline choice is regular—and a mind that’s clear and free of the quixotic or exotic. Lew Icarus Bede said of his poetry, “…it is historical, anecdotal, referential, and, at the same time, expressing the enormity of the modern experience”. Cincinnati is a city of around 300,000, with a metro, including the cities mentioned above, of about 2,200,000. Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus (c. 519 BC – c. 430 BC) was a statesman and legendary figure of Roman virtue.
~~~
Wild Bergamot
Brac Lei Uweeds
He saw the purple native known as wild bergamot,
along the housing-tract development, drought-tolerant.
Its flowers flourished lavender together in a clump,
upon a wide and slight-curved hill, a meadow on a hump.
Like as a tropical, rain-forest bloom, alienesque,
its folliage flickering in wind, a thin, fine arabesque.
He stopped to see if butterflies and bees would come to them.
Would hummingbirds pause mo-men-tar-i-ly there near some stem?
He saw no rabbit, nor a deer, come up to taste its leaves,
remembering how they attacked his roses fervently.
He loved this hardy wildflower baking in the heat,
not wilting, no, but lilting buoyantly, there by the street.
Brac Lei Uweeds is a poet of flowers.
~~~
Upon the Frontage Road
by Bruc “Diesel” Awe
He drove upon the frontage road, the highway at his side.
He loved to watch the freeway traffic; it was quite a ride.
He saw the semis and the other vehicles go past,
more than one-hundred-ten-ki-lo-me-ters-per-hou-r fast.
He passed the malls and giant flags flap-rip-pl-ing in th’ air.
He passed the water towers and the building sites prepair.
He passed apartments and motels, trades, tackle, gear, and trim,
He passed the high, sky-climbing Sun, or rather it passed him.
He pulled his visor down to block its glaring, flaring flames.
He drove down under other highway overpassing lanes.
He rode the time, he read the signs, he kept on moving on,
along the long and falling pathway of day-dappled Dawn.
I-80 in Nebraska, a Grand Tour
by Bruc “Diesel” Awe
“…I take to the open road…”
—Walt Whitman
Along the pathway of the Great Platte River, it proceeds,
and goes from Omaha west to Wyoming’s boundary,
I-80’s length encompasses some 80 exit ramps
to all parts of Nebraska’s basketry of postcards stamped.
It has more than four-hundred-forty bridges crossing it
and twenty-five rest areas, pit stops, to clean off grit,
like all those insects plastered on the windshield’s aeroscreen,
protecting riders and providing visibility.
Milemarkers line the roadway, all along the interstate,
including Lincoln to Grand Island—grandiose and straight.
Bruc “Diesel” Awe is a poet of transport. Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was an American Realist poet. With approximate populations, Omaha (480,000), Lincoln (290,000), and Grand Island (50,000) are cities in Nebraska.
~~~
R. P. Smith
by Cabe U. Wesderlie
He’s a fourth generation rancher from Nebraskan lands,
a waste-not-, want-not- cultured man recycling his brands,
who turns his wrecks of life into a user-friendly verse,
as clear as open skies across the western universe.
In Broken Bow off Highway 80, he resides today,
a cowboy balladeer who grows increasily blue-gray,
whose homegrown radio show makes one smile, laugh and cry:
O, as Will Rogers said, “Lord, let me live until I die”.
Cabe U. Wesderlie is a poet of the Midwest. R. P. Smith is a contemporary balladeer. Broken Bow, Nebraska is a town of around 3,500. Will Rogers (1879-1935) was an American Modernist humorist, cowboy philosopher and citizen of the Cherokee nation.
~~~
“Reincarnation”
by Wallace McRae
“What does Reincarnation mean?” a cowpoke asked his friend.
His pal replied, “It happens when yer life has reached its end.
They comb yer hair and warsh yer neck, and clean yer fingernails,
and lay you in a padded box away from life’s travails.”
Wallace McRae is a contemporary cowboy poet.
~~~
Yellow in the Yellowstone
by Raise Club Weed
A freight train, crossing rushing Yellowstone, plunged in to it,
when a bridge in Montana crashed at one spot on its route,
and hazardous materials it carried smashed below,
hot asphalt, molten sulfur, yellow seen within its flow.
Diluted by the swollen river, tank-car fluid leaks,
when cooled, solidify, but figuring costs could take weeks.
The bridge collapse took out a fiber optic cable too,
disrupting services for customer computer use.
Potential hazmat spillage triggered an emergency
to deal with the accident with fast, stressed urgency.
Raise Club Weed is a poet of Montana.
~~~
The Early Morning Mourning Doves
by E. Birdcaws Eule
I’ve never seen dead mourning doves in brown mulberry leaves,
their bones, red-streaked, stripped-down and left, not so far
from the eaves
of Eden, or the sins of Cain. Who made the Lamb made them,
like as the feral cat in morning’s shadows who ate them.
These days she is unable to sort out her varied pains.
Grief piles on grief; forgive her tears. Let them be unexplained.
Please… Shovel in her hand, she made what burial she could,
placed in to a small hole beneath a rock, song gone for good.
Two purple blossoms from the early hostas on the grave,
in honor and remembrance. What more left was there to save?
True love of anything is loss of everything it was.
Hope must bring balance, or the garden dies…like mourning doves.
E. Birdcaws Eule is a poet of birds. In addition to Blake, the above dodeca draws from the contemporary poet-editor of Aji.
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