Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
A man lifts the blinds,
and seize, next to the window,
a morning dove sits.
Tanka
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
Though I yet survive,
I shall meaningfully live,
like this great frost must,
which can’t find a place to rest,
and pass these days in the World
“Clear Dew” Ibuse is haiku and tanka writer. Nijō Yoshimoto (1320-1388) was a noted Japanese renga poet of the early Muromachi period.
~~~
Haiku
by “Wired Clues” Abe
Amid Earth’s loud wars,
the leaves change colours and fall—
Nihon Kidankyo.
“Wired Clues” Abe is a poet of NewMillennial haiku. Nihon Kidankyo, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, advocating for a nuclear free world, received the 2024 Nobel peace Prize.
~~~
I Look Up As I Walk Along
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
So that the tears won’t fall, I look up as I walk along,
remembering those days of spring, today I am alone;
and as I walk, I gaze into the blue with tearful eyes,
remembering those summer days, alone with all these skies.
Happiness lies above the heavens, and beyond the clouds:
I look up as I walk, so I won’t drown in my own tears.
And yet the tears well up into these overpassing shrouds.
Which gardens will I pass by as I’m watering my years?
The lyrics of “Ue o muite arukou” [上を向いて歩こう] were composed by PostModernist Japanese lyricist Rokusuke Ei (1923-2016).
~~~
This Milky River Game
by Li “Web Crease” Du
Three-thousand years of tragedy and thirty dynasties—
they are not deep or mystical, those t-ruthless histories.
It’s rather power, paranoia, and collapse…repeat;
new emperors with new mistrusts, eventual defeat.
It’s rather palace jockeying, with masses left behind,
old leaders with old visions leading a band of the blind.
Shang, Han, Tang, Song, Ming, Qing,…up to today. Obey, or die.
The Yellow floods, the people starve, the taxes are too high.
Begin again. The chaos comes. The sequel is the same.
The Kosmos is the backdrop of this Milky River game.
Li “Web Crease” Du is a poet of China. Ken Cao is a contemporary wordsmith.
~~~
“Arivai virivu sei, agandamakku,”, that is: “Expand knowledge—make it universal.”
—Bharathidasan
Bharathidasan [Kanaka Subburathinam (1891-1964) ] was a Modernist Indian Tamil poet.
~~~
Bitter, Yet
by Rus Ciel Badeew
Past two o’clock. You must have gone to bed, to bed, to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night, so dark and cold.
I’m in no hurry. A green wool cap irritates my head.
I have no reason now to trouble you. I’m not that bold.
And, as they say, the incident is closed. I just can’t sleep.
Fifteen degrees. The ice and sleet, the white bright snow is deep.
We still remain, despite the daily grind, but it is hard.
The quiet sets upon the World, like a sharp, harsh shard.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars. What can one say
to history, the ages, and creation…come what may?
I don’t want to turn off th’ electric heaters, but it is
too dangerous to leave them unattended. Bitter, yet.
Rus Ciel Badeew is a poet of the Cold. Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was a Modernist Russian poet and playwright.
~~~
Encore Jazz Suite, Waltz Number 2 by Shostakovich
by Rusica Bedewel
“The most powerful, quirky music ever written.”
—Ewald E. Eisbruc
Waltz Number 2 by Shostakovich is both gorgeous and
touched by grotesquerie. Its sweep is beautiful and grand,
though its long, suave, melodic lines, sweet and continuous,
have dark, absurd buffoons, ridiculous and ominous,
the pizzicati strings, the snare drum’s tapping tac-tac-tac.
It seems like it is ever trying to get off its track.
His work of 1938, C-minor and E-flat,
leaves one expecting carousels or swinging acrobats.
Still, it’s quite mem’rable from intro by the clarinet
to booming sounds contrasting with discrete, neat disconnects.
Rusica Bedewel is a poet fond of Russian music. Among the composers he admires are Rubenstein, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsly-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Tiomkin, Khachaturian, and Modernist Russian composer, Shostakovich (1906-1975).
~~~
Far Fallen
by Luwese Becardi
“…like restless gossameres?”
—S. T. Coleridge, “Rime”
Far fallen from the Alpine Mountain heights,
our tour guide, in Turino’s neighborhood,
points out a refuge, where, to our delights,
we find a place to rest; and it is good.
At once a pair of butterflies appears.
amidst green blades of grass beneath our feet,
Parnassus, snowy white, flecked red and black,
apollos on the wing—sheer gossameres—
ice-shot each curved, transparent shiny sheet,
flaps up to rhododendrons at our back.
As fast as it showed up, it goes on, oh,
that moment of Papilionidae,
and we are left at peace again. Strano,
between the all and nothingness they fly.
Our tour guide turns to tell us something strange,
“This journey isn’t what you think it is.
This visit is to see the new amidst the old.
A younger man before he dies, lives pure,
here in the country beyond the cities.
Tuberculosis makes him cold, and bold;
detached, he sees life curiously, sure,
like an insect transfixed upon a pin.
But things do not remain the same; things change;
and near the end he may start to begin.”
Luwese Becardi is a poet of Italia. Guido Gustavo Gozzano (1883-1916) was a Modernist Italian poet.
~~~
Lawrence of Britannia
by B. S. Eliud Acrewe
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born at Tremadog, in northern Wales,
on August 16, 1888, the second of five sons
of Lord Chapman, an Irish baron adopting the Lawrence name.
He spent his early boyhood at Dinard, in the northwest of France,
and was educated at the city of Oxford high school and
at Jesus College, Oxford, where he took honors in history.
From 1908 until 1910, during his vacations,
he studied medieval castles both in Syria and France.
At Carchemish, a Hittite ruin on the upper Euphrates,
with Hogarth, Thompson, and Woolley, he took part in excavations
from 1911 to 1914; and in 1912
with Petrie in Egypt. In January of 1914,
he participated in Kichener’s “Sinai Survey,” where he did delve
in military intelligence work disguised as surveying,
contributing an official report The Wilderness of Zin.
In December of that year, after the outbreak of World War I,
he joined the Arab Bureau in Cairo. In March 1916,
he was sent to negotiate with the Turkish generals in
Mesopotamia for the honorable capitulation
of a British unit besieged at Kut, frankly beyond fixing.
In May of 1916, he joined with King Feisal of Mecca,
who was the leader of the Arab Army of Liberation,
and showed him how to disrupt the Turkish forces, by attacking
Hejaz Railway trains enroute to Medina by demolition.
Lawrence received some 32 wounds during this desert campaign.
In a camel charge, he helped capture Aqaba on the Red Sea,
aiding the British divisions that were attacking Palestine.
While spying, disguised as a Circassian recruit, when he came
to the headquarters of the Turkish commander at Deraa,
he was brutally assaulted, but got away unrecognized.
When General Allenby led the English troops into Gaza,
Lawrence and the Bedouins helped the Allies by their destruction
of the key railroad junction of Maan; only just once, pausing,
to completely massacre the Deraa police battalion,
on the way to Damascus in advance of the British forces.
When World War I ended, Lawrence refused to accept an earldom,
but he accepted a fellowship at All Souls’ College, Oxford.
In 1919, he attended the Versailles peace conference,
unsuccessfully pressing Arab independence on the world,
and the forming of a Jewish state; he was an oxymoron.
Negotiations failed because of the British and French mandates.
Because of the ensuing disorder, Churchill gave him carte blanche
to arrange in 1922 a Mideast peace settlement.
In that strange world between poetry and prose, he had meanwhile launched
his text on tactics and strategy of irregular warfare,
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his account of the Arab Revolt.
Under the name Ross, Lawrence enlisted in the RAF;
but an officer betrayed his identity; he had to bolt.
In 1923, he enlisted in the Royal Tank Corps
under the name of Shaw, and during this time, when he had leisure,
he would go test each year’s new model of the Brough motorcycle.
In the sweep that had been his life up to now, this was a pleasure.
He was allowed to reenter the RAF in ’25;
and, on the advice of G. B. Shaw and E. M. Forster, polished
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and then had it privately printed.
To defray the costs of this harrowing adventure of his life,
a shortened popular version of the book was later published ;
and under the title, Revolt in the Desert, it was minted.
Lawrence was transferred to Karachi, working as barracks store man,
from 1927 to 1928, completing
The Mint, which was an account of his RAF recruit training
at Uxbridge. From 1930 to 1935, meeting
th’ decade head on, he helped develop speedboats at Southhampton,
and, in 1932, he translated Homer’s Odyssey.
In 1935, his RAF enlistment had expired,
and on May 19, expired himself when he crashed while on
a motorcycle near his Dorsetshire cottage Bloud’s Hill, where he
had become somewhat of a myth which he both disliked and fostered.
B. S. Eliud Acrewe is a Modernist British poet. Tremadog, Wales, is a village of around 1200. Herbert Kichener (1850-1916) was a British Army officer, King Feisel of Mecca (1885-1933) was a noted figure of the Middle East, General Allenby (1861-1936) was a noted British figure of WWI, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was a Modernist Irish playwright, and E. M. Forster (1879-1970) was a Modernist English proset. This proem biopic of T. E. Lawrence (1888-1935) draws from Modernist British proset Robert Graves (1895-1985). Aqaba is a Jordanian port of around 150,000. Southhampton is an English port city of around 250,000.
~~~
Newsreel:
Since Sudan’s Civil War began in 2023,
more than one-hundred-fifty-thousand died. O, where is peace?
~~~
Retro Intro:
“Ô ária raiô, Obá Obá Obá
Ô ária raiô, Obá Obá Obá
Mas que nada…
Sérgio Santos Mendes & Brasil ‘66 intro to their “Mas Que Nada”
Sérgio Santos Mendes (1941-2024) was a Brazilian composer of relaxed samba.
~~~
Newsreel:
A lake in Sao Paolo’s Ibirapuera Park is green
from algae blooming, stemming from heat and a lack of rain.
Sao Paolo, Brazil, has a population of around 12,000,000.
~~~
Oldsreel:
Fran Jeffries sang and danced to “Meglio Stasera” in
the movie starring Peter Sellers, “The Pink Panther”, din.
Fran Jeffries (1937-2016) was a PostModernist American singer and dancer.
~~~
Black Printed Words on White
by Wilee Read Bucs
The blonde assassin passes on. The ice must go away,
just like the reading of a book, page after page and day.
Inevitably sheet by sheet it leaves the reader’s sight,
while closing on an end, it weaves black printed words on white.
Wilee Read Books is a poet of reading. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) was an American Realist poet.
~~~
You
by Erisbawdle Cue
Though every single person may be against you,
that doesn’t mean that you cannot, or should not, try.
It is your duty to do all that you can do
to reach whatever it is that you strive for. Why?
What else is there to do? You have no other choice.
And though you can’t break through, at least you can give voice.
Erisbawdle Cue is a poet of philosophy.