Wise Words with Bruce Wise

There are, indeed, so many things that could be said
about Vincent Van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard at Arles
one hardly know where to begin. First there’s the red
that fills the fields with faceless people, real, rural.
Then there’s the white and radiant sun-disc ablaze
within a yellow golden sky shining o’er all.
At right, a road curves in, reflecting gleaming rays,
bright, shimmering, and glittery. A row of trees,
at left, leans inward toward the orange of this day’s
harvesting. Other interesting things one sees
include a house, a horse and cart; and yet, instead
of life, it seems a window to a color frieze.

Beau Ecs Wilder is a poet of 19th century painting.

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Another Sample Whalloping of Ire
          by Acwiles Berude

Mark Conditt, 23, of Pfluggerville, with sinful fire,
contributed another sample whalloping of ire.
He set up packages with bombs that blew on opening,
a father and a young musician dead from tampering.
Four other people injured added to his spate of spite;
so random and so damning, so absurd, it isn’t right.
It seems that something’s rotten in the state of USA,
when people roam the streets with anger in their inner clay.
What motivates such arrogant antagonistic hate?
The answer history has given…is the human state.

Acwiles Berude is a poet of the hate that seems endemic to the human state, from ancient texts, including Homer’s “μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ”…”Sing, goddess, of the mania” to the present time. What amazes me is how hate has so many faces…passionate, cold, wild, mechanical, vicious, apathetic, relishing, disgusting, political, apolitical, unintended, motivated, quiet, loud, torturing, uncaring, cruel, shocking, and on and on and on. It has almost as many facets as love has.

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The Deputy Blaine Gaskill
          by W. Belaid Secure

The deputy Blaine Gaskill was the good guy with a gun,
who stopped the shooting killer kid in Great Mills, Maryland,
who quickly ran straight for the gun sounds, he did not want to,
but did his duty faithfully, his training tried and true.
He had to cover quite a bit of ground to reach the shots.
He never paused to hide behind a bush. He never stopped.
And when he got there, Gaskill fired at the shooter just
as he was firing one more round. But, o, he bust it up.
The SRO did what was right, but still the loss of life
is tragic in such incidents, with which our time is rife.

W. Belaid Secure is a poet of protection and safe-keeping. SRO is an acronym for school resource officer.

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Putin’s Landside Victory
          by Rus Ciel Badeew

Apparently with no surprise, to any Russian firm,
Vladimir Putin won election to another term.
Congratulations from the World poured in to his desk;
so many nations round the globe are glad for his success:
the leaders of Azerbaijan, Moldova and Iran,
Bolivia, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan,
all joined the choir, Belarus and Cuba chiming in,
as well as Venezuela, China, full of timely grin.
In fact, the emperor of China, happy as could be,
Xi Jinping said relations were “the best…in history.”

Rus Ciel Badeew is a poet on Russia. Some wished the Salesman had not put in a phone call to Putin, however belatedly, and went so far as to call him a Trader. [Путинка is a brand of Russian vodka made by the state-owned Moscow Distillery Crystal company that plays upon his name.]

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Turkey’s Ethnic Cleansing
          by Curdise Belawe
          “ISIS-like, Turkey’s Olive Branch is beating the Yazidis to death.”
              —Eweseçü Birdal

And now the murdering begins again—in Syria.
The Turkish tanks and bombers move to smash the area.
The Kurds in Afrin flee, but only lucky ones escape.
Civilians die by hundreds, the whole region’s being raped.
The terrorists from Ankara, with mad jihadist bands,
are plundering, destroying, taking over hard-worked lands.
And now they want to crush all Kurdish cultural icons;
they’ve toppled Kawa’s statue in the middle of Afrin.
Such hatred and such viciousness—again the genocide?
Will such intolerant combatants ne’er be satified?

Curdise Belawe is a poet of the Kurds. The word genocide was first applied to the Turkish massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and other Christians a century ago. After the killing of thousands of Kurds, Christians, and Yazidis, Erdoğan said, “…the terrorists had turned tail and run away…” but not Anna Campbell, from England; she was killed in a Turkish airstrike on March 16, 2018.

In 2013, jihadists beheaded a statue of Abassid-era poet and blind philosopher Abu al-Alaa al-Maari (973-1057). In 2015, they destroyed a sculpture of Ibrahim Hanano in Idlib. The word genocide was first applied to the Turkish massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and other Christians a century ago. The latest was the statue in the center of Afrin of Kawa—the legendary blacksmith of Kurdish mysthology whose fire illuminates the Kurdish struggle against the totalitarian regimes of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, and Iran.

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The Blind Aleppo Vegetarian Finds His Way
          by Curdise Belawe

Do not unjustly eat the fish the water’s given up,
nor slaughtered animal flesh, nor fresh white milk in a cup.
Do not grieve unsuspecting birds, by stealing eggs from them;
injustice is the worst of crimes; it’s filled with flasks of phlegm.
Do not take honey from the bees who work with industry
to take the nectar from the fragrant flowers that they meet;
the bees do not store honey so that others can take it,
nor do they gather it for bounty or for golden gifts.
I wash my hands of this and wish that I had seen my way,
much earlier, though I am blind, and now my hair is gray.

The above and the following are a very loose paraphrases of Abassid-era poet and blind philosopher Abu al-Alaa al-Maari (973-1057).

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Expressions of Abu al-Alaa al-Maari
          by Curdise Belawe

Do not suppose the statements of the prophets to be true;
they all are fabrications, pagan journeys of the fools.
Men lived in comfort till they came and spoiled life with such.
The sacred texts are only idle tales filled with mulch.
If one were born among the Magians one would become
enthralled by all their Magic tricks. The great cults make one dumb.
Inhabitants of earth are of two types: one is with brains,
but no religion, and those with religion and no brains.
Walk softly on the earth, its crust is bodies of the dead.
Walk slowly in the air. Don’t crumple spirit-jinns of God.

On Elisabeth Langgässer (1896-1950)
          by Uwe Carl Diebes

Your daughter of the wind survived, your sweet Anemone,
when Spring arrived, you could again sing songs convincingly;
and though the multiple sclerosis soon would take your life,
the daughter you thought dead appeared post all the horrid strife.
A joy, like that of Nausicaa, had appeared again,
although the ringing of the dead still in your ears remained.
You saw the iron Gorgon’s gleam; you weren’t crushed under it;
but seeing bodies in the Styx, your eyes weren’t innocent.
So when you rode the River Lethe at the very end,
and Pluto snatched you down, how hard was it then to descend?

Uwe Carl Diebes is a poet of Germany. Because she was part Jewish, for twelve years she could not write, and when World War II ended, Elisabeth Langgässer was happily reunited with her daughter Anemone, who had been sent to Auschwitz, but had been saved by the Swedish Red Cross.

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A Prison Speech: 18 March 2018
          by Clide Abersuwe

Friends, Britons, lovers of free speech, I’m not your countryman.
My name is Martin Sellner, and I am an Austrian.
I came to speak at Speakers’ Corner, but I’ve been detained;
I’m sitting in detention, my cell phone has been retained.

My woman friend named Brittany was taken from my side.
We both will be deported. O, we did not come to Hyde.
Lend me your ears. I represent a patriotic group
called Generational Identity; we love the truth.

But I’ve been silenced by authorities for my beliefs
to halt migration of these deadly, evil feudal sheiks.
I did not come to bury Britain; brutal people did,
on rubble of the freedom they despise and they want hid.

From London, Paris, Rome, Vienna, even on the beach,
we will fight on for freedom, homeland, and identity.
Unlike the fascist, racist haters we will not wear masks
and blow up children at their concerts, people at their tasks.

I have not come to praise tradition, but to bury it.
I am an Austrian. I will remain a patriot,
despite such vile venom and such vicious, wretched phlegm;
today we face a new totalitarianism.

You know that Britain always had new people come to it,
and such were welcomed when they came here to be a new Brit;
but when pigs trash the English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, and those
who make United Kingdom good, the sheep will be deposed.

Authorities consider free speech is more dangerous
than gangs or terrorists, than rapists or cult criminals.
Replacing English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh—all those born here—
is what they want, to make each feel foreign, filled with fear.

And now we are not being let to talk about this death.
But in my cell in Colnbrook, with each and every breath,
I will continue to speak out against such tyranny,
beneath an English-Scotch-Welsh heaven on an Irish Sea.

Clide Abersuwe is a poet of the Scotch. He transcribed this poem, with artistic license, from a speech by an Austrian crusader against censorship.

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Today at Paphos
          by Esiad L Werecub

It is long gone–the Festival of Love–
at Aphrodite’s Temple at Paphos
in southwest Cypress, azure skies above
the bright, foamy sea-waves from which she rose.
The goddess, noble and magnificent,
no longer walks with flowers blossoming
beneath her feet, so lovely, redolent.
No longer is it such an awesome thing.
Today at Paphos all that yet remains
are broken columns, steps, mosaic floors,
a stadium of stone that time disdains,
and the occasional hallways and doors
that go to nowhere in particular…
pathetic, silently oracular.

Esiad L. Werecub is a poet of ancient Greece.

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O, Quintus Cornificius
          by Aedile Cwerbus

O, Quintus Cornificius, Catullus was not well.
By Hercules, he was indeed, distressfully quite ill.
And iller he became each day, perhaps until he died;
but he had hoped he could be comforted. Alas, he sighed.

But he was angry at you, augur of that Roman tribe,
before the civil war had started and you were proscribed.
Did you see coming Utica in 42 BC?
Did Cornificia, your sister, write an elegy?

Alas, her epigrams are gone, like your epyllion.
There is no consolation possible for anyone.
Time travels on with truer traipse than purest honesty,
sans sadder tears than those that fell from great Simonides.

Aedile Cwerbus is a poet of ancient Roma. Catullus was a friend of Cornificius, a general, orator, and poet of Ancient Roma, who wrote a now-lost epyllion Glaucus. His sister Cornificia was also a poet of also now-lost elegies.

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“Colombia Tierra Querida”
          by El Edwi Escubar

“Colombia Tierra Querida” was written by
Lucho Bermúdez in the mid 20th century.
It is surprisingly upbeat, excitingly so, oh;
one cannot help but go along with its so thrilling flow.
“Colombia Tierra Querida” such a sweet hymn;
although it isn’t, it could be its national anthem,
a song of faith and harmony, the yellow, red, and blue.
The rhythmic cumbria is lively, lovely, glad and true.
“Colombia Tierra Querida” ‘s a fav’rite tune.
“Colombia Tierra Querida,” I’ll be back soon.

El Edwi Escubar is a poet of South America, “Colombia Tierra Querida” is a favourite song of his.

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For the Men of the USS Indianapolis: 1945
          by War di Belecuse
          “The very deep did rot: O Christ!”
          —S. T. Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

The ship had just completed its quick trip to Tinian,
with the first atom bomb e’er used in war by anyone,
and then proceeded on to Leyte in the Philippines,
through waters still patrolled by Japanese-helmed submarines.

Torpedoed by I-58, it sank, o, hapless souls,
in but twelve minutes, down it went—the͡ Indianapolis.
With heavy thrump, about 300 went down with the ship,
the rest then facing horror on this wretched, fated trip.

Exposure, dehydration, deadly water-salt and sharks,
a thousand slimy things surrounding them in vicious arcs.
More than 500 more Americans died in that sea;
and after four days there were left, 317.

An orphan’s curse can drag to hell a spirit from on high;
and an ungrateful person can spit in a dead man’s eye;
so let me honour them for fervent, heart-felt loyalty;
for, o, those sailors gave their lives for countrymen, like me.

War di Belecuse is a poet of the military.

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The Bede BD-5
          by Air Weelbed Suc

The Bede BD-5 Micro jet of 50 years ago
was introduced in kit form in the 1970s.
Its streamlined fuselage with grandiosive canopy
put the reclining pilot front and centre at the sky.
The engine was installed in the mid-fuselage itself,
with the propeller-driving power at the cockpit’s rear.
Though only a few hundred kits were ever engineered,
today some of those very jets remain airworthy yet.
The classic BD-5J version holds the record for
the World’s lightest single jet aircraft—350 pounds.

Air Weelbed Suc is a poet of flight, particularly human and mechanical. This is an example of balland verse, unrhymed iambic heptametres, a New Millennial response to Elizabethan blank verse.

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Destruction of Long Island Statues: March 2018
          by Cardiwel Ebuse

A statue of the Virgin Mary was beheaded at
the Church of Saint Gerard Majella in Port Jefferson.
A vandal also broke a hand, who knows the reason why;
but hatred roams across the land beneath the open sky.
The maker of the statue said that he would freely give
another to the congregation; love, it seems, still lives.
But earlier, a week before, some vandals sacrificed
another statue, this one of a life-size Jesus Christ
outside the shrine, Our Lady of the Island, Manorville.
It seems intolerance and hate will never have their fill.

Cardiwel Ebuse is a poet of the Catholic Church.