When I Became a Passenger
by I. E. Sbace Weruld
I felt like as a spaceman landing on a grassy lawn,
within the middle of a century half come and gone,
a world far beyond my ken—incomprehensible,
yet nonetheless quite real, visible, and sensible,
a world of technologies, of cities, cars and streets,
of people, fauna, plants and flowers, bushes, shrubs and trees,
a world of electric lights, of buildings, gates and halls,
of strange mysterious designs and oddest rituals,
a universe of galaxies, expanding, grand and vast,
when I became a passenger upon this rocket blast.
SN 1000+0216
by I. E. Sbace Weruld
“‘Tis strange—but true…”
—George Gordon Byron
SN 1000+0216 flashed in solitude.
Its peak far-ul-tra-vi-o-let ab-so-lute mag-ni-tude
reached -21.5, exceeding its own host,
the furthest supernova seen by humans, now a ghost.
O, once upon a time, and twice beneath a period,
the light seen in 2006, was older than the scud
before our solar system showed up in the cosmic flood;
though really only one small wrinkle in the brow of God.
How strange to be the witness of stars gone before the Earth,
and looking back in time, epochs before our very birth.
I. E. Sbace Weruld is a poet of the Universe.
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But One Guy
Urbawel Cidese
Although he was but one guy, and I only saw him once,
he who’d strength in abundance and a brutal countenance.
I saw him looking to the right. What was he looking at?
Perhaps some figure in a taxi with a photostat.
He wore a red band wrapped around his upper right bicep;
I wondered what significance it had—that flowsy strip.
He also wore a white outfit that made him seem ideal;
but he was only one guy at the crosswalk of the real.
Where was he going to, I wondered, with his bulky frame—
to bus stop¸ hot rod, sweet love, hard job, cheap eats, or to fame?
While seeing him stopped at that intersection for one sec,
amidst the traffic and the towers straight-up-high erect,
I could not help but feel that to be alive is good;
and then he vanished just as quickly as he had been viewed,
which made me think that that is what life is like on this sphere;
one moment we are here, and then the next we disappear.
We float like bubbles to the surface of a lava flow,
and then we pop into the air. We fly. Where do we go?
The World turns, the city churns, the Sun burns out in space.
One day will they too vanish from this street without a trace?
Urbawel Cidese is an urban poet.
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The Xian
by Wu “Sacred Bee” Li
I saw him standing at the door, his hand upon its frame.
I did not know why he had come, but I was glad he came.
I was downcast, and hoped that he might lift my spirits up.
When he stepped in, I greeted him, and offered him a cup
of anything that I posssessed that he would like to drink.
He took some port, and started sipping, liking it, I think.
Although we talked but little, what we said was strong and deep,
and slowly happiness into my heart began to seep.
He pulled me from my sorry self into the realms of men,
and after his brief visiting, I was content again.
The Man at the End of His Journey
by Wu “Sacred Bee” Li
I never wanted then to take this journey, but I’m here;
and yet what other route would I have taken—far, or near?
When I was young—much younger—I would toss my words away;
I’d no desire to hold them still. Life was for living. Hey!
All else was false. O, I was sure of that. I knew not why.
I turned the dial of the microwave. Cook life on high.
But now that I am here. I can’t go back, nor do I wish
for what will never happen. I am glad. I hear a shih…
that comes down from the mountains gleaming in the brilliant sun.
Where have I been? Where am I going? O, what have I done?
Wu “Sacred Bee” Li is a poet of ancient China. A Xian is spiritually transcendent being in Daoist philosophy.
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Australia
by Walibee Scrude
With all my heart, I love Australia; I can’t help myself,
a golden, sprawling mass, lined with a continental shelf.
I love its cities on its rim; it’s where I long to loll.
I love its flora, fauna, but the people most of all:
the swimmers, surfers, cyclists and soccer players too,
retail sales workers, carers of the old and new,
school teachers, electricians, nurses, managers and clerks,
accountants, medical providers, truckers, and the works.
Australia is an arid land between two oceans set,
a brilliant coloured opal, time won’t easily forget.
Uluru
by Walibee Scrude
Uluru is a massive sandstone rock formation in
the southern part of Northern Territory stationed in
the centre of Australia, standing in the desert grid,
an isolated island mountain, soaring inselberg.
Its surface is composed of arkose, feldspar, quartz and rock,
suggesting derivation from a source like Musgrave Block.
It lacks all jointing at the parting bedding surfaces—
that monolith arising in the arid emptiness,
that stands above three-hundred-forty metres in the sky
and changes colours as its dreamtime days go rolling by.
Walibee Scrude is a poet of Australia.
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The Famine of Bengal, 1942-1943
by Waseel Budecir
“Relieve the people of Bangla Desh.”
—George Harrison, 1971
A lie will travel halfway round the World, before the truth
has time to put its pants back on; lies can be so uncouth.
That Churchill starved Begalis back in 1942
just isn’t true. In fact, he did about all he could do,
within the midst of holocaust—the throes of World War II—
in trying to keep India safe from Japan’s tight screw.
But there were some who really didn’t help the plight at all;
some Hindus and some Muslims helped cause famine in Bengal.
Now Kelley’s Churchill quote upset the Twitter applecart,
and his apology has left him reeling from the smart;
but that harsh famine was complex, no Twitter firestorm
could grasp half of what happened there; it isn’t even warm.
Waseel Budecir is a poet of South Asia. Astronaut Scott Kelley was dissed for texting: “In victory, magnanimity”. Winston Churchill (1874-1965) was a British writer and statesman, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.
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A New Day Rising: After Anand PKC
by Red Was Iceblue
“In India, diamonds are everywhere, as they are in China, in America.”
—Sri Wele Cebuda
The water is so blue, the leaves of grass as dry
as twigs beneath the similar-hued elephant,
so huge, beige-brown and firm, beside the azure sky
and branching trees, big, rugged, clumsy, elegant,
not in a china shop but in the wide outdoors,
important and magnificent, significant.
Right at the forefront of the scene, one sees forms—scores—
large ears, eyes spread, long trunk past tusks of ivory,
thick legs, splayed feet, on one of nature’s many floors,
an ambling, like nothing else in Tennessee,
or India. I wonder where this is. I sigh…
my sight—a new day rising, free. Where can it be?
Red Was Iceblue is a poet of Modernist, Postmodernist, and New Millennial art. Anand PKC is an American painter from India.
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A Pause in India
by Sri Wele Cebuda
Parked on rough, wood planks,
white Jumanipari goats,
a foal and mother,
pause on their path’s arc past plants
cliff bound, hanging gold and green.
Sri Wele Cebuda is a poet of India. This poem syllabically is a tanka.
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The Disappearance of Jamal Kashoggi
by Saudi Becrewel
Where is the Saudi journalist Jamal Kashoggi at?
He went into, but did he leave the Saudi consulate?
Police from Turkey think he may have been killed on the spot,
for he has not been spotted leaving it. No, he has not.
On Tuesday he had gone there to obtain some paperwork;
but no one knows where he is at. Where does his body lurk?
The day he disappeared some fifteen Saudi men arrived,
in diplomatic cars they left, suitcases in the drive.
Crown Prince bin Salman said, “we haven’t anything to hide,”
“and Saudis too would like to know what happened to his hide”.
Saudi Becrewel is a poet of Saudi Arabia. How can one not think of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” in this context?
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On an Euler Argument
by Euclidrew Base
On both sides of the Pregel, once great Königsberg was set,
with two large islands, seven bridges, like a pretzel net.
In th’ early 18th century, a question had been posed,
Could someone cross each bridge one way, and cross each only once?
Leonhard Euler first replaced each land mass with a node,
and then connected each bridge with an edge to take the load.
Next, Euler pointed out the bridge count to each mass was odd,
and therefore, this walk could not take place. Such a walk was flawed.
In his solution, Euler put graph theory on the map,
and the foundations of topology—without an app.
Lazarus Fuchs (1833-1902)
by Euclidrew Base
He built upon Briot, Bouquet, and yes, the memoir on
the hypergeometrical equation of Riemann,
initiating systematic focused study of
regular singularities, his passion and his love.
Linear ordinary differentials drove him sane;
he longed to linger on equations in the complex plane.
His motivation came from lectures done by Weierstrass—
Lazarus Fuchs—his own work sharpened by Frobenius.
His work served as a starting point for Henri Poincaré;
he even taught young Hilbert a semester and a day.
Élie Cartan (1869-1951)
by Euclidrew Base
Beyond the bright blue light of sky, lie algebras of Lie;
Élie Cartan observed this in the 19th century.
Lie algebras are vector spaces over some known field
with a binary bracket and axiomatic yield—
anticommutativity, bilinearity,
identity (Jacobi), and alternativity.
He learned of Killing’s work on finite transformation groups,
that were continuous—that labouring a major coup;
and then he classified the semisimple algebras
across the complex field, fathoming exceptionals.
The Whitehead Link
by Euclidrew Base
The two curves of the Whitehead link, with linking number nil,
have been depicted on an old Thor’s hammer, the Mjölnir.
It was described by Milnor back in 1954,
a circle in infinity not touching door or floor.
This ancient Viking artifact has touched one way we think;
in present-day, knot-theory math, it is a basic link.
But what a diff’rence in the vision of a thousand years,
the way we contemplate the shapes of space-time pioneers,
the way we look at life in gen’ral relativity,
the ancient and the modern linked—historeality.
Euclidrew Base is a poet of mathematics. Mathematicians mentioned above include Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), Carl Jacobi (1804-1851), Karl Weierstrass (1815-1897), Charles Briot (1817-1882), Jean Bouquet (1819-1885), Bernard Riemann (1826-1866), Sophus Lie (1842-1899), Wilhelm Killing (1847-1923), J. H. C. Whitehead (1904-1960), and John Milnor is a living mathematician.
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The Dodo
by Scubie Dew Lear
He dodged the sun, the dodo, when the sailors hunted him
and introduced invasive species to Mauritius.
Proposing then a caucus race in order to get dry,
the dodo said let everyone leave off whene’er they like;
that way each person entered in this crazy race can win,
including even jabberwockies from the loony bin.onsense
The jubjub and the bandersnatch galumphing with the snark,
all mimsy, frumious, and beamish on the Cutty Sark,
then sailed away and vanished at the setting of the sun,
the dodo having since retired t’ unbridled biddledom.
Scubie Dew Lear is a poet of Victorian sensibilities and joie de vivre funsense. Like Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832-1898) he enjoys word play, mathematics and fantasy.
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The Polar Bear
by Eb “Walrus” De Ice
I saw him sprawled about an ice mass lit by solar flames.
It looked like he was pausing for a moment from his games.
It was a chance for him to leave behind his hunt for fish,
his constant longing for their never-ending dip and swish.
The blonde, light hair about his head was golden in the sun.
I wondered if his opened eye could see if anyone
was looking at him as he hung about that empty place,
and wondered if he dreamt of catching seals he had chased.
And though right now he was upon the land, relaxed and free,
he’d spend most of his quarter century of years at sea.
Eb “Walrus” De Ice is a poet of the North. He is the “Walrus”…goo goo g’joob.
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To a Critic
by Esiad L. Werecub
You catalog my poetry, “poetic artifice,”
and think I need to flee the virgin goddess Artemis.
You tell me I need to “dig in” and get more “serious,”
and think I need to flee the likes of deft Odysseus.
You tell me I am not “authentic,” too “pseudonymous,”
and think I need to flee the guys of masks, like Aeschylus.
You tell me I must drop my stance and be “a child again,”
and think I need to flee the onomaklyton Orphen.
You tell me to “cut loose, write for myself” not someone else,
and think I need to flee the lyric bent of Pindarus.
Esiad L. Werecub is a poet enthralled by ancient Greece.
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The Muses Come to Many
by Aedile Cwerbus
Though Homer has priority, the muses do not hide—
their faces—have appeared to others, as their eras died,
like Pindar or Simonides, Catullus or Petrarch,
like Stesichorus or Alcaeus, Horace or Ronsard;
nor has time wrecked all that Anacreon did write in sport,
nor those deep loves that Sappho played upon her harp string’s court,
nor likewise San Juan, John Donne, Blake, Poe, and Bacchylides;
the muses come to many making lyric melodies.
Aedile Cwerbus is a poet of ancient Roma.
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At Poznań Castle’s Entrance
by Ludiew E. Sarceb
At Poznań Castle’s entrance, a commanding monument
to M. Rejewski, J. Różycky, H. Zygalski stands,
to them who helped crack the Enigma Code the Germans set,
with cryptological card catalog, cyclometer,
and cryptologic bomb. Cryptography’s domain became
part of the grand, vast range of mathematics growing game.
The bronze, three-sided obelisk with numbers and their names
acknowledges their contributions in belated frames.
Before the gold-white castle’s Neo-Romanesque design,
it rises tri-rectangularly in a lofty line.
The Drummer at the Drum
by Educable Wires
The drummer sat with his drum sticks above a flat drum head.
He was about to set a beat that would a song imbed.
He started hitting it; vibrations moved this way and that,
until it almost seemed a rounded movement going flat,
like as a tired tire as it limps along a road,
or eigenfunction of an operator’s spatial mode.
The throbbing pounding of his beat was quickening so fast,
one wondered if the song itself would disappear at last,
until it was unrecognizable paralysis
that warped into the hole of functional analysis
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Brazil Election 2018
by Luc Ebrewe Dias
Brazilian Jair Bolzonaro managed handily;
with 46% he was the leading candidate.
In second place Fernando Haddad, 28%;
the two compete in the next-round vote for the president.
The dirt will fly the next few weeks from rightists and the left;
there is a lot that both will say, and both of them will get.
Throughout his long career Bolzonaro has been known
for throwing vitriol at victimhood and quota moan.
Last month he called for his opponent to be shot, and then
just two days later he was stabbed right in the abdomen.
Luc Ebrewe Dias is a poet of Brazil.
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Trip to a Gym: on Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
by Wilbur Dee Case
One dark and moonless summer night, I went out for a spin.
I came upon a clean, well-lighted place, and I went in.
A golden lad sprawled on a bench. It was an open gym.
I saw what seemed to be a boxing glove right next to him.
I felt hemmed in by way too much, although the room was bare
but for that guy, a wooden floor, and some equipment there.
The understated style weighed down heavily on me,
and so I bade farewell to that man in that well-lit sea.
I left that exercising dude who was so down and out;
though dark outside, I knew the sun would also rise no doubt.
Wilbur Dee Case is a poet and literary critic of the middle of America.
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The Fremont Bridge in Portland, Oregon
by Alec Subre Wide
“Its view’s spectacular—techno-oracular.”
—Ubs Reece Idwal
The steel tied-arch bridge traversing the Wilamette is
the second longest steel-tied bridge…on the Earth…it sits
in Portland, Oregon, and carries 405 southbound,
a gray span over gray-flushed waters underneath gray clouds.
Its concrete lower deck suspended from its upper deck
hangs from its orthotropic, steel-plating, high-tech trek.
From round the World, folks observed its record-setting lift,
a financed, Federal Highway Administration gift.
Each day a hundred thousand autos speed across its length—
the Fremont Bridge, in high-relief, a sweep of g/race and strength.
Alec Subre Wide is a poet of bridges.
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The Plumber
by Des Wercebauli
I saw an old gray-headed plumber leaning on a wall.
He wore low jeans, high gray-blue tank-top, but no coverall.
Although he has to get down and get dirty all the time,
and work his hands and tattooed arms around the grime and slime,
he’s still a happy camper, humming as he does his job,
connecting pipes and caulking, twisting, tightening a knob.
He’s happy ’cause he has a job, and earns a salary.
He tries to keep his cool and never act unmannerly.
He goes about his labour with strength and agility,
and gets paid for connecting people to their water needs.
Des Wercebauli is a poet of workers and working.
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He Stood
by Beau Ecs Wilder
“But none of them owns the landscape.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
He stood next to a replica of Van Gogh’s rising moon,
the golden wheat fields piled up, a gorgeous, orange boon.
He felt like as a farmer might, surveying bundant yields.
O, God, it is so beautiful, a worthy crop revealed.
He loved the labourers of land; he loved their noble toil.
He loved the workers willing to get down into the soil.
He loved this sky, o, green and golden, rising over him.
He loved Van Gogh’s designs, o, God. No, it was not a whim.
But what was he to make of that blue crest up to the right,
a wave of beauty over him, eternal golden light?
Beau Ecs Wilder is a poet of 19th century art. Evening Landscape With Rising Moon is a painting of 1889 by Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890).
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At the Restaurant
by Carb Deliseuwe
It was a small, but cozy restaurant. They came to eat.
Two sat together at a table, waiting for some meat.
The workers in the kitchen were concocting varied meals.
Aromas filled their noses up with sweet, delightful squeals.
The waiter brought the order to the counter nonchalant,
while workers went about their business in the restaurant.
The clean-cut boss, a smile on his lips, shushed his helpmate;
his helper understood completely picking up the pace.
The waiter paused up at the counter, waiting for the cooks.
He work a black tee and gray pants, small beard, and far-off looks.
The boss was stirring up the pot, aboil on the stove.
The worker lifted up his plate; it was a work of love.
They stood beside the bright red wall, the stack of trays and stuff.
The waiter grabbed a counter plate; his look was fierce and rough.
And then the helper stopped his work and sat back on his ass.
The boss got very serious; he could not let that pass.
So what would happen now, one wondered. Would he be fired up,
the boss, the worker, or the waiter? It was time to sup.
The helper got up off his ass and finished up the job.
The boss was satisfied; the waiter too; there was no prob.
Carb Deliseuwe is a poet of food.
he is so thrilling to read