Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
One brief hand’s sweep leaves
a mosquito’s body, blood,
and gladly, no itch.
Haiku
by “Clear Dew” Ibuse
High up to the sky,
rolling hills of douglas fir:
We managed to live.
“Clear Dew” Ibuse is a poet fond of traditional Japanese haiku.
~~~
Haiku
by “Wired Clues” Abe
East Pakistani
split from West Pakistani
made Ban-g-la-desh.
“Wired Clues” Abe is a NewMillennial haikuist. Bangladesh became a nation in 1971. It has a population of around 175,000,000.
~~~
A Human
by Rubel Saeed Wic
You are a human even when it seems your meds are gone,
enough to get you past your surgeries—a kidney stone.
To understand a man you must observe him when alone.
It does not care when a dog barks at it—the lucent Moon.
We are strange creatures who prefer illusion to the troon;
for happiness, yes, Humayun, ah, Ahmed…passes soon.
Rubel Saeed Wic is a poet of Bangladesh. Humayun Ahmed (1948-2012) was a PostModernist Bangladeshi proset and film-maker. “Troon” is a neologism meaning the illusion of truth.
~~~
Change in Uzbekistan
by Waseel Budecir
He died, the ruthless autocrat who ruled Uzbekistan,
and quickly afterwards was laid to rest in Samarkand.
Paraded through the streets of Tashkent, and then carried off,
the coffin came to the hometown of Islam Karamov.
The funeral at Registan Square was elaborate:
a mufti prayed before the male-mourning labyrinth;
the gorgeous skies were bright above the massive madrasahs,
of Tilya-Kori, Ulugh Beg, and leonine Sher-Dor.
Prime Minister since 1 September 1991,
Uzbekistan had had no other master but this one.
Since then Shavkat Mirziyoyev has been elected thrice,
and built a house with marble and Swarovski crystal-ice.
Waseel Budecir is a poet of Central Asia. Uzbekistan has a population of around 39,000,000.
~~~
The Great Lords of the Philistines
by Israel W. Ebecud
And so the great lords of the Philistines
did gather thence to offer sacrifice
to Dagon, their main god, and to rejoice.
They said, “Our god has given the Danines’
Samson, our enemy, into our hand,
the ravager of our beloved land,
he who has slain so many of us.” When
their hearts were merry, they said, “Call Samson
that he may make sport for us.” And so he came.
And they made sport of him. A lad led him
between the temple’s pillars. That self-same
lad Samson then addressed. “Let me feel them—
the pillars, tall, on which this temple rests—
that I may pause, and on them lean…against.
Israel W. Ebecud is a poet of the Levant. Like Hercules, Gilgamesh, and Enkidu, Samson (c. 1100 BC), the last of the Judges of the Ancient Israelites, was noted for his strength.
~~~
Newsreel:
Ukraine struck Yandex data centers, a third one in a row,
in Vladimir, Kaluga, and, near Moscow, Sasavo.
Vladimir is a city in Russia of about 350,000, Kaluga, 335,000, and Sasavo about 25,000. Has Ukraine drone strikes made Internet traffic less obnoxious?
~~~
At Hellespont
by Çelebi Ürwëdas
It’s sad to see what happens to the mind,
when it to narrow straits and landscapes flows.
Here is the place that freedom left behind.
No more Leander after Hero goes
at Hellespont, where he did stand and stare
from off Gallipoli Peninsula,
then swam the Dardanelles, between the fair
Aegean and the Sea of Marmora.
It has become Hell’s Point, where Xerxes crossed
with his grand army of a million men;
and Turks took what Constantinople lost;
and crushed an Allied force in World War I.
Since then, one hears of currents running rough
but never any stories told of love.
Çelebi Ürwëdas is a poet of Turkey. Recently, drone attacks throughout the Black Sea have caused nearly as much destruction in shipping as at Hormuz. From 1993, “What is Love” is a song written by Dee Dee Halligan and Junior Torello, and sung by Trinidadian Haddaway.
~~~
Phoenician Dido
by “Cruel” Wadi Seeb
Phoenician Dido, daughter to a king of Tyre,
fled to North Africa after he had been slain.
From some North Africans, she became a buyer
of land. They offered to her what seemed no bargain,
a plot “no larger than what an ox-hide surrounds.”
Carefully Dido cut the ox-hide into thin
strips and made a very long string; and thus the bounds
became the capital of her empire—Carthage.
From such a humble beginning, Queen Dido founds
a city that would become to Rome a challenge,
to Ann’ a pyre, to Aeneas a distant fire,
the uncontrolled result of unbridled revenge.
“Cruel” Wadi Seeb is a poet of enduring hate. Tyre is a city of southern Lebanon of about 60,000.
~~~
In the Quiet of the Night
by Uwe Carl Diebes
“Poetry ever becomes more prosaic.”
—Claude Eberwir
In the quiet of the night, in total darkness, the light from a single light bulb casts its distance to the edge of black shadow over the bark-dust of the wood-pile. The rain-storm has passed, but mist is still in the air. This place reminds me of a place I never knew—in Germany—war’s harsh vista. O, I am so thankful I never had to face such wrenching horror. The pain in my lower back, aching, however, links me to such wretchedness, a whole World consumed in ashes of ack-ack-ack. A soul can be content in a death-bound carcass, when that is all it has. Want thrives in complete lack.
The Word, the Line, and the Prosem
by Uwe Carl Diebes
The word, the line, and the prosem falter under the weight of what I’, trying to stick in them. Such weight makes them all paltry, hence, not able to move, though lying true. We live in a very strange age indeed, when more writing than ever is being done with less purpose. We live by the screed. So many eyes but so little seeing. Now we are networked all over the Globe, but we’re saying less than ever before to loved ones and neighbours. We scan this Orb, but have a hard time getting out of the door.
Uwe Carl Diebes is the composer of the above prosems.
~~~
Cimabue
by Buceli da Werse
“Credette Cimabue nella pintura
“tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è oscuro. »
—Dante Alighieri
Then, at the end of the medieval world,
when Giotto di Bondoni plied his trade
of fresco painting, works that he unfurled
at the Arena Chapel, Padua,
transformed the realm of painting forever.
With wat’ry pigments, he applied his paint,
which bonded together with wet plaster.
But that was not all. Also, he revealed
new added depths, spatial architecture,
and pictorial substance. His life congealed.
His rediscovery was then muraled,
and thence, removed from rationals to reals.
The Single Candle
by Buceli da Werse
The single candle burning in van Eyck’s
The Arnolfini Marriage in daylight
can be thought of as God’s all-seeing eye,
a counter to the natural bright sky,
the purity and unity of love,
or as a symbol of devotion. There
are many things it is reflective of.
That tear-drop flame in midair chandelier
shows van Eyck’s close attention to detail,
his virtuosity, so finely wrought,
the translucence oil painting can reveal,
that consistence a stable varnish got;
and how perfection in miniature
indicates more than merely a picture.
On a Poem of Niccolò Fontana
by Buceli da Werse
When few poets, critics, or publishers of this generation are interested in my work, it can hardly be a surprise that I look elsewhere for inspiration. To be so thoroughly rejected does mean that my aims do not coincide with theirs, either the PostModernist poets or the NewMillennium critics. Be that as it may, this is not unusual. After all, history is replete with such figures. One figure, Piero della Francesca, remained unappreciated, following his death in 1492…for centuries.
In the century following the death of Piero della Francesca, the 16th, Niccolò Fontana, a mathematician who lived in Venice, saw his own fortunes collapse due to the machinations of more polished and more articulate figures, Gerolamo Cardano and Lodovico Ferrari. It has been said that he became a bitter man after Cardano published his Ars Magna, and died impoverished in 1557. Cardano’s slender tome, which Felix Klein centuries later said was a “most valuable work contain[ing] the germ of modern algebra [and] surpassing the bound of ancient mathematics,” was devoted to solving third-order and fourth-order equations, and, albeit acknowledging so, broke his promise and wrote on the work Fontana wanted to write about.
That Fontana had a difficult life is rarely contested. His father was murdered when he was five; and immediately thereafter his family was in poverty. At twelve, a French soldier sliced his jaw and palate in Brescia, the town of his birth, whereupon he was given the nickname “Tartaglia,” the stammerer. Nevertheless, this self-taught and socially maladept Renaissance figure translated Euclid’s Elements into Italian, published Latin editions of Archimedes, wrote on the military applications of mathematics, penned a popular arithmetic book, gave an expression for the volume of a tetrahedron, and advanced the frontiers of algebra.
In addition to all that, Fontana also wrote some remarkable verses that find little favor with most, that is, his capitolo of twenty-five lines, a series of tercets on his solutions of third-order equations. It is one of those rare works that dovetails into that netherworld between fields that have long since forgotten how to communicate with each other, in this case, between mathematicians and poets. But even more important than mathematicians gleaning its information and poets ignoring its mathematics, it is for me that ideal moment when the two are close.
The poem, a series of eight tercets and one extra line in the manner of Dante Alighieri, gets down to business immediately, utilizing an alliterative hard c sound:
Quando che ’l cubo le cose appresso
Se agguaglia a qualche numero discreto,
Trovami dui altri, differenti in esso.
Fontana refers here to a general equation of the form x3 + px = q, and then suggests finding two other numbers of which it is the difference, e. g., u – v = q.
The second tercet speaks of a product, that is, uv = (q/3)3, though the verses
Dapoi terrai, questo per consueto,
Che ’l loro produtto sempre sia eguale
Al terzo cubo della cose netto…
say q3 /3. Still, by this point in the poem, one can see Fontana’s mastery of elision, the fluidity of his terza rima, and the striking clarity of his line.
Tercet three likewise shows his continuing adept handling of mathematical abstraction in the domain of poetry:
El residuo poi suo generale,
Delli lor lati cubi, ben sottratti
Varrà la tua cosa principale.
Here he means x = 3√u – 3√v. There are few writers of the past millennium with a similar gift. Pascal in the next century penned a penetrating prose in Penseés, and later, Hamilton wrote some sonnets and Lewis Carroll some nonsense.
The fourth tercet begins a new example:
In el secondo, de codesti atti,
Quando che ’l cubo restasse lui solo,
Tu osserverai quest’altri contratti…
Act Two begins with x3 = px + q. Here you will also observe, in line 12, a fine alliterative ending, which agrees quite nicely with the previous rhymes.
Tercet five presses on in similar manner
Del numer farai due tal part’ a volo,
Che l’ una, in l’ atra, si produca schietto,
El terzo cubo delle cose in stolo…
Here the number you will divide into two parts would be q = u + v. Again, as before, he should say uv = (q/3)3, not q3/3. This reminds me of Keats mistaking Cortez with Balboa. Does any writer, perhaps other than Dante, have so much fun with one, two, and three? The opaque prose of Charles Sanders Peirce, which similarly treats of firstness, secondness, and thirdness, in contrast, seems so much more obfuscative.
The sixth tercet continues on:
Delle quali poi, per commun precetto,
Terrai li lati cubi, insieme gionti,
Et cotal somma sarà il tuo concetto.
In this particular case, you will take the cube roots added together, and this sum will be your thought, i.e., 3√u + 3√v = x. This is the language of a pure mathematician, precise, abstract, logical, and to the point, qualities rarely found in the poetry of the last millennium. Even Fontana’s casual appositives have an ideal generality about them.
By the time we reach the seventh tercet, Fontana’s evenness of style and his brilliance of tone are already so much in evidence, one is not surprised to see he evinces the same, even toward the end. Since he has taken good care, as in nature, the whole is almost perfectly matched, if not matchless.
El terzo, poi de questi nostri conti,
Se solve col secondo, se ben guardi
Che per natura son quasi congionti.
His third and final example is x3 + q = px. It is not surprising that Fontana, being a pioneer, did not possess the complete general solution to ax3 + bx2 + cx + d = 0.
In his final tercet plus one, Fontana places his discovery in the context of place and time and tells us he found these calculations in 1534 on solid foundations in that city surrounded by sea, Venice; an ironic statement in the light of subsequent events.
Questi trovai, et non con passi tardi
Nel mille cinquent’ e quattro e trenta,
Con fondamenti ben saldi, e gagliardi,
Nella Città del mar’ intorno centa.
I am reminded of Dürer’s Melancholia of 1514, which is dated by the magic square embedded in his engraving. Here Fontana’s date and place fill out the finale of what in my mind is one of the most extraordinary of Renaissance rhymes.
Buceli da Werse is a poet of Renaissance painting. Cimabue (1240-1302) was a noted painter. Dante (1235-1321) was a noted Italian poet. Jan van Eyck (c. 1390-1441) was a Netherlandish Renaissance painter.
~~~
Living in a Vacuum
by Ira “Dweeb” Scule
I am reassured by the scientists
that there can’t be a vacuum. That’s too dumb.
Then what is this place, this strange existence
that I’m in–this space-time continuum?
When so many things collide and scatter,
how can I be sure things really matter?
Everywhere I go, I’m living in a
vacuum. They say I can’t be every day.
And yet, here I am again in a vacuum.
It doesn’t go away. It continues on
each and every day, evening, noon, and dawn,
all the time. In fact, it seems to ac-cum-
u-late. Everywhere I go, I am, oh,
in a vacuum that I know can’t be. No?
This Life
Ira “Dweeb” Scule
It was a beautiful world, a world of
troubles and pains filled with laughter and tears.
It was a world of sweet kindness and love;
and yet, it was real; and it lasted years.
And it almost didn’t make sense at all,
except, that was all I ever had, y’all.
In Order to Proceed
by Ira “Dweeb” Scule
How strange it was to grow up in a land beside the Sea.
Pacific Ocean, Washington, and Oregon were free…
of major conflicts…Why were we to study history
of lands so far away…so distant…we would never see.
But back in 1917, the US was drawn in
to that war that the Old World had crashed in to everyone.
So there he was in his old school with World History…
beginning of so many tales that he would come to see,
as if somehow it was important he would have to face
the bad results and utter madness of the human race.
Ira “Dweeb” Scule is a poet of school.
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