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Four Slogans of Qi Hong
In Chongqing, China, August 29th, on high-rise walls,
a bold display of anticommunist ideas sprawled.
With two sets of projectors and surveillance cameras,
Qi Hong sent out into the city these large messages:
“It’s only with no communists that China can be new;
And freedom is no gift; to have it one must take it too;
Rise up you who refuse to be a slave; reclaim your rights;
Down with red fascists; overthrow dictating parasites.”
For fifty minutes, these four slogans cycled through and forth,
until security discovered where they had come from.
Qi Hong had smartly gone to Britain, or he’d have been killed
for demonstrating his free will and engineering skills.
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Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and former English teacher currently residing in Texas.
What a great story of initiative, nerve, and daring to broadcast the anticommunist truth in an intricate way in a major Chinese metropolis.
As Mr. Peterson has pointed out, this act breathes “initiative, nerve and daring”. It is acts, like those of Qi Hong, that inspire, even those of us in other lands who have to fight such evil; as, for example, in this recent newsreel:
The grisly act, this horrid fact, more blood has now been spilled.
At Utah Valley College, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.
The hate continues unabated; death claims one more day.
Assassination rears its ugly head, two-hundred yards away.
Bruce, I’m glad you brought Qi Hong and his ingenious messaging to our attention. His four slogans form an impressive heart to your poem. Then you yourself took up the immediate creation of four most expressive lines on the very day of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. They are as good or better than others presented here and elsewhere. The “two hundred yards away” ending brings the “grisly act” close to each reader. Excellent technique effectively brought out for a horrid moment, that one of us has called the “President Kennedy moment” for today’s youth and children.
Just goes to show you, Chinese citizens are under constant surveillance. It was brilliant of Qi Hong to pre-schedule his messages and plan his escape in advance.
It is not difficult to concur with Ms. Corey, pointing out Qi Hong’s brilliance in pre-scheduling his messages and planning his escape in advance. His daring words were worthy of a dodeca. Ms. Corey, likewise, in her poem “Because She Walked in Beauty” did as much for Roya Heshmati, who showed even greater bravery. Across the World, one can find inspiring individuals, none more so than Charlie Kirk.
I did find Mr. Steinle’s metric observation of Ms. Corey’s translation of “Castile” by Modernist Spanish poet and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) interesting. She has resorted to one of the most challenging problems for me when facing Ancient Greek, Ancient Latin, and modern Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese; and that is, unstressed ending syllables. It is the joy of the trochee and dactyl, opposed to the iamb and spondee.
A Córdoba, España
by Raúl de Cwesibe
What else remains of once impressive walls
surrounding Córdoba, except some gates
and damaged towers, Calahorra crenellates
beside Guadalquivir’s tan, sandy sprawls.
O fertile plain, o soaring hills, dawn calls
us out into the presence of its greats:
the glory of the sword—Gonzalo Fernández—
and pen—Luis de Góngora—gold scrawls.
Its dullness rides; its brilliant ride commands.
Into this city what has not been hurled?
The Great Cathedral in the Great Mosque stands.
Three hundred thousand dwell amidst a world
of Roman, Visigoth and Moorish strands
out of which Spain’s alloy has been unhurled.
I could see this poem being used in an operetta of some kind. Very well versed
Light opera, the operetta, had its greatest swell,
just at the time the opera was winding down as well;
and it in time would be supplanted by the musical,
et cetera…
Such is the science of sound patterns, the acoustical.
Mr. Muller has a good point, for I am attempting to use tennos, mainly, and other ballad structures, like dodecas, as fragments from this great rotating planet Earth in this Universal squAll, as pieces of the grand and epical, in the manner of Callimachus.
He knew that his work could not win applause, while people were still intoxicated with flowers, the moon, sweet repose, or pause; all of that had to be extirpated. He was in love with revolution’s fire. He liked agitation and violence. The Blok-like poetry he did admire, Mao Dun called hypertrophy of slogans. So it came as a bit of a surprise, when after crying tears over Lenin’s death, and having supported the enterprise of the CPC for a decade’s breadth, Jiang Guanci from Anhui left it; not that he was expelled as a traitor from it.
The writer mentioned in the above prosem, Jiang Guanci (1901-1931), was a Modernist Chinese novelist.