The Super, Blood, Blue Moon: January 31st, 2018
          by Drew U. A. Eclibse

On January 31st, before the Moon dipped down
into the light of dawn, as it—the Earth—was going round,
its bright and pale whitish colour slowly darkened some,
and fell behind the shadow of the Earth—blocked from the Sun.
The Moon became an eerie sight, cast in a reddish hue;
because its light was bent, it gave a faint and glowing view,
the super, blood, blue Moon illumining my white bed spread.
O, it was not the frost that made it seem a dullish red.
I gazed between the shutters, as the bright moon reappeared,
and looked ahead, within my home, as one more ending neared.

Drew U. A. Eclibse is a poet of astronomical ruminations, frequently seen staring off into space. Embedded in the last few lines is an allusion to Tang Dynasty poet Lĭbái’s “Thoughts in the Silent Night.”

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The SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket
          by I. E. Sbace Weruld
          “We have your satellite.”
              —”Red” Eubaws Ciel

The SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket blasted off the launch
with Musk’s red Tesla roadster catapulted after lunch.
It left from Cape Canaveral, in northern Florida,
and soared into the atmosphere o’er forming, pouring clouds.

Two of the Falcon Heavy rocket cores touched down to Earth
about 1,000 feet apart in paralleling berths;
the centre core, however, did not hit the drone-ship must;
so that part of the mission was the launch’s biggest bust.

The car went coasting through the infamous Van Allen belts,
that intense radiation region’s pounding particles.
No fuel froze up,no oxygen in place was vapourized,
and now the dummy-driven auto heads to random skies.

I. E. Sbace Weruld is a poet interested in all things astronomical, including space flight. he has been inspired by, inter alia, Hipparchus, Newton, Maxwell and Einstein.

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Hylas and the Nymphs
          by Beau Ecs Wilder

John William Waterhouse’s “Hylas and the Nymphs” must go;
enchanting, pretty, water nymphs are far too much to show.
Manchester Art has claimed it is unsuitable right now.
It is offensive, and it must be censored. Take a bow.

The postcards too must be removed; PreRaphaelites are bad.
To contemplate such loveliness is nothing less than mad.
If beauty’s truth, and truth is beauty, don’t let it deceive.
These dream-like maids amidst these water lilies have to leave.

O, all the rest can stay! It’s just that one that must be stored.
O, mad one, yes, I tell you now—it stands without the door!
But gusts of public outcry blasted back, and panels flew!
and there the unenshrouded canvas came back into view.

Beau EcsWilder is a poet and art critic of the 19th century. The Victorian painter Waterhouse has received a short reblast of fifteen minutes of fame; and the Victorian artist is in the news in a way he never would have been had the painting not been censored for a week.

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Adam Sedia, Piano Sonata Number 1 in G, Opus 3
          by Waldi Berceuse

The andante con spirito of Adam Sedia
in Piano Sonata Number 1 in G is a
spectacular, melodimatic and echoic piece
that runs about like crazy cops and comical police.

The adgio più mosso is more slow, as it begins,
but scintillating like fine sequences of bright sequins.
One minute it’s Mozartian and the next it’s Joplinesque,
the heartfelt colouring upheard almost bare arabesque.

And then, th’ allegro molto scatters like three seething mice
below a party playing music chairs, and grinning thrice.
Ah, last, the end, suspended in a genuine intrigue,
displays a dizzying dismount, as wonderful as Grieg.

 

Adam Sedia, Piano Sonata No. 2 in C Minor, Opus 4
          by Waldi Berceuse

Immediately, Adam Sedia’s piano piece
“Sonata Number 2, C Minor,” launches sans surcease;
Beethovenesque, the powerful allegro, forges forth
with all the force of a Romantic strumming, thrumming Thor.

Although the largo slows the pace just momentarily,
and moves on with Mozartian flair, if hardly airily,
the graceful race continues on at one heck of a speed,
exaggerated, animated, colourful indeed.

Then finally, molto allegro, with alacrity,
and expeditiously, with dizzying velocity,
advances Rushin’-like from out th’ 20th century,
headlong out to the edge of one unruly, raging Sea.

Waldi Berceuse is an Eastern European musical critic. American lawyer and poet Adam Sedia’s second full piano sonata, composed in 2004, was revised 2016-2017. For him it is the darker twin of the first. By the way, this poem is a dodeca, a poem with three quatrains of iambic heptametre, a created structure of R. Lee Ubicwedas.

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Winnie the Pooh Banned
          by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei
          “Shí shì qiú shì (Seek truth from facts.)”
              —Ban Biao/ Ban Gu/ Ban Zhao, “The Book of Han”

The Chinese government is cracking down on Weibo sites
that do not serve the Chinese Communists preemptive rights.
It must suspend key portals, trend-search features, and low taste,
rap music, dirty language, crude cartoons, and gossip waste.
It needs to censor content of opinions that are wrong,
obscenity, and micro-blogging platforms anti-Han.
100,000 Internet police are watching for
words, like democracy, Winnie the Pooh, and old Eeyore.
All media and news must serve the Chinese government;
and Xi Jinping is sacrosanct, like Mao’s enlightenment.

Lu “Reed ABCs” is a poet of China. Though the quote was used by figures, such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist government is ever trying to censor anything that does not idolize the Xi-Jinping Imperial Machine.

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#What The Schiff
          by Wic E. Ruse Blade

A phone call came in April from a source to Adam Schiff,
the ranking Democrat on House Intelligence—punked stiff.
And this would not have ever come to public view, except
the audio prank spoof was posted on the Internet.
It seems two Russian comics, known as Vovan and Lexus,
pretended they “hed peektures of a naiket Donawld Trump.”
And they could “furneesh heem with verry sleezy kompromat”
straight from Ukrainian Chair Andriy Paubiy they had got.
“All righty…this is helpful…I appreciate…” Schiff said;
and “with the FBI” we’ll try to get those “copies,” yes.

Wic E. Ruse Blade is a poet of the serious and the refined, and therefore, admires short stories, like Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Devil and Tom Walker,” or Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” “The Macbeth Murder Mystery,” or “The Catbird Seat.” One of his favourite, ironic moments, given Russia’s long history of enlightenment and delicate snowflakes (almost up there with Middle Eastern religious tolerance), was when Putin sang, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill” at a televised event some years ago.

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Tolstoy at 82: The First Colour Photograph in Russia
          by Rus Ciel Badeew

He’s sitting on a slatted, wicker-like, white chair,
whose right arm his right arm rests on, and right hand holds,
while his left hand lies on his lap. Up in the air,
his left black boot and gray-pant leg there overfolds
across his right leg firmly planted on the ground.
His long-sleeved blue shirt his old shoulders’ contours molds,
down which his long white whiskers fall in strands around
his light-brown, round face, and serious countenance,
as if at something grim he recently had frowned.
He sits before a sun-lit background’s dark tree trunks,
beyond, which are vague shrubberies and branches bare,
before, which is his stare, pushed keen and out in front…
as if it were a mountain waterfall’s despair.

Rus Ciel Badeew is a poet fond of Russia and Russian literature. In the picture, Tolstoy’s right arm is resting on the chair’s right arm, which his right hand holds.

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What Business Is It?
          by SubCIA Weedler
          “It had to be flashin’ like the daily double…”
              —Allen Ginsberg, “Hadda Been Playing on the Jukebox”

American petroleum consultant Carter Page,
a one-man fund and firm set on the Central Asian stage,
who specialized in Russian gas and oil commodities,
a tragi-comic figure, dimpled, strangely odd at ease,
portrayed as economic pundit and authority,
a wackadoodle character seen on the Russian screen,
had been surveiled by the FBI for many months,
a dodgy dossier used for the FISA warrants’ thrust.
Informally advisor to the Kremlin staff in prep
for the G-20 summit, a goofball out of his depth,
this Forest Gump who never spoke to Trump, will of the wisp,
his civil rights abused because of language that he lisped,
through wire-tapping, a la Fusion GPS decree.
What business is it of mine, if they don’t take yams from me?

SubCIA Weedler is a poet of espionage. The last line is an allusion to a poem by Nigerian poet Niyi Osundare.

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Christopher Okigbo (1932-1967)
          by Debare Ilsecwu

He did not learn to shut his mouth, and so he went to hell.
town crier of a nightmare, tethered to an iron bell.
With the succession of Biafra, he joined that state’s force,
he, Christopher Okigbo, field-commissioned for the war.
Against Nsukka, the Nigerian troops stormed the town;
and it was there the major died; there where he was shot down.
The Earth unbound him, prodigal, and ram tied to his time,
his prayer’s ultimate expression lost within the clime.
An old star falling from the heavens left us on the shore;
but new ones show; stars come and go…on for forevermore.

Debare Ilsecwu is a poet fond of Nigeria. Among Nigerian poets he most admires, in addition to Okigbo, are Wole Soyinka, Niyi Osundare, and Philip Begho.

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Sam Taylor Coleridge: a Fragment
          by Wilude Scabere
          “the exaggerated repute of Kubla Khan…”
              —T. S. Eliot

In England in between Porlock and Linton, did
Sam Taylor Coleridge retire. On the Exmoor
confines of Somerset and Devonshire, he hid,
retiring in ill health. An anodyne was poured,
while reading Purchas’s Pilgrimage, “Here the Khan…”
He slept in sunless chair [I wonder, ‘Did he snore?’],
for three long hours, through caverns measureless to man,
three hundred lines or less, inclosed within four walls.
What vivid confidences did his drugged mind span?
The images arose down rills and waterfalls.
Here forests ancient as the hills enfolded him.
Awakening within those dark and dismal halls,
he had distinct remembrances of his dreamed gem.
He took pen, ink and paper up, and wrote them down,
until some guy from Porlock came and cut that stem.
When he returned back to his room, his dream unwound,
like images upon the surface of a stream
into the which a stone was cast—alas, without
the after restoration of the latter scheme.

Wilude Scabere is a poet fond of British and Irish literature. He considers Coleridge to be one of the best literary critics of English literature.

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Richard Wilbur (1921-2017)
          by Cadwel E. Bruise

What I remember was a picture—you reclining there
upon a summer’s day, a piece of straw poised in your teeth.
Those were the halcyon days, after World War II’s hard crash,
for you in Italy, back home in Massachusetts’ plash.
Amidst the howling madness yowl’d, life studied and unhurled,
you told us of the love that calls us to things of this World.
Amidst the noise, you still were blessed with beautiful changès,
the quiet and occasional in time’s unending r-age.
And at the end, you were still typing on your second hand
L. C. Smith, when the rest of us had gone keyboard command.

Cadwel E. Bruise is a poet fond of Massachusetts and its rich literary heritage.