(All poetry by Bruce Dale Wise)
Venezuelan Woes
by Lud Wes Caribee
As Socialist experiment Venezuela sinks
into far greater depths, a plunging country on the brink,
Maduro, striving for an orderly recovery,
has pegged the bolivar to petro cryptocurrency.
He has increased the minimum wage sixty-some percent;
the problem is the shops cannot afford to pay their rent.
While beautiful Venezuela sinks into abyss,
upon its current strategy of Socialism’s bliss,
where uncooked chickens cost just 14,000,000 bolivars,
and hundred-thousands leave the land on foot. Who can drive cars?
The problem is the other nations do not want their poor;
Peru, Brazil and Ecuador are closing up their doors.
Lud Wes Caribee is a poet of the Caribbean.
Taipei
by Si Celebrade Wu
Taipei’s the major city of the nation of Taiwan,
located on the northern tip, along with port Keelong,
the capital, since 1949 of ROC,
the metro area, about 1/3 of Taiwanese.
Landmarks include the Baoan Temple and Chiang Kaishek Hall,
Hsing Tian Kong Temple of Guan Yu, the business patron god,
and Buddhist Lungshan Temple, Manka, honoring Guan Yin,
the mercy goddess who perceives the World’s sounds within.
Above the buses, trains and cars, the scooters, bikes and hum
of 7,000,000 people, rises Taipei 101.
Si Celebrade Wu is a poet of Taiwan.
Deleting Avi Yemini
by Walibee Scrude
Another Jewish man has been deleted by Big Tech,
the latest, Avi Yemini, was pummeled by FacePeck.
To FacePeck “hate speech” means one’s thoughts are too conservative;
they do not want an Aussie patriot to speak out live.
He’s running as a candidate rep in the upper house;
he’s from Victoria, southeast Australia is his home.
His foes shout out, aloud and proudly, “Auschwiz-Birkenau,”
and add to that more, “Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau.”
Australia’s in the middle of a war on speech, he says,
but maybe it is worse than that, an antiSemite phase.
Walibee Scrude is a poet of enamoured of Australia and Aussie attitudes.
A New Surveillance Grid
by Esca Webuilder
Leaked documents show Silicon is plotting to launch forth
a censoring search engine for the Chinese dictaforce;
so government officials can then blacklist thoughts they hate,
like human rights, democracy, religion, truth and fate.
The Google project codenamed Dragonfly is on the way,
with apps, like Maotai, to keep the populace at bay.
The Firewall of China is not great, nor is it good;
but Google leaders, like Pichai, would like to join its hood;
and that way they can help support suppressing Chinese folk.
Democracy dies in the darkness of an evil yoke.
Esca Webuilder is a poet of the Internet.
I like these. You clearly state your position on the evils of socialism, fascism, and the war against free speech. My favorite rhyme was “Big Tech … FacePeck”. That was really funny.
I vote for Esca Webuilder as the funniest line. All amusing and thoughtful as always, a virtual reality trip around the world through the eyes of Bruce!
I agree, James! That might be my favorite heteronym yet! Thanks, Bruce, for sharing more timely pieces here.
Mr Webuilder, you are world wide in your coverage, as befits your latest surname. ‘Venezualan Woes’ clearly shows the reach of failed policy beyond borders. These are thought-provoking poems as always.
“Deleting Avi Yemini” was all too relevant. I am baffled by Facebook’s criteria of what is acceptable and what is not.
Although I enjoy wit and humour, as one can tell so do Ms. Foreman, Mr. Tweedie, Ms. Tyler, Mr. Watt, and Mr. Whippman from their writings, there was little of humour in these lines; I guess by default that makes the bylines more humourous. Si Celebrade Wu is one of my newer charichords; but Esca Webuilder has written poems relating to the Internet for half a decade, as has Walibee Scrude in relation to Australia. Mr. Tweedie’s remark made me wonder if Esc A. Webuilder would be better name. Despite there being well over 200 of these charichords (I just can’t keep track of them all), they do get rather limited play upon the Internet; and it’s very unpredictable which ones reach a larger audience. Sometimes it’s the topic that funnels a poem into a more popular blog.
Anyway, I appreciate even cursory comments, but it isn’t easy when one is attempting to keep up with the steady flow of knowledge and political events around the World to respond in a timely thoughtful manner to the ongoing work of poets here and elsewhere. And I know my comments can seem relatively stuffy. I did enjoy Mr. Tweedie’s contrapuntal feast, particularly the Irish jig, the chatty violin and the more believable cello. Though poetic and prosaic voices frequently excel elsewhere, @ SCP the ekphrastic and the musical dovetail into poetry more deeply here. Here is an older poem of my French musical critic that I was reminded of when I read Mr. Tweedie’s works.
Ballad
by U. Carew Delibes
The rustic minuet’s small step
has since been swept away
by all the modern pop and pep
and fizzle of the day.
One of the first to introduce
it into music’s lair
was Frenchman Jean Baptiste Lully
of Louis’ court and care.
That king first danced it at one of
his famous, fancy balls.
Of it he could not get enough
within his brilliant walls.
He liked its bows, he liked its glide,
he liked its many steps,
to front, to side, to back, to slide
in graceful, gentle sweeps.
In suites it took its place between
the sarabande and gigue,
with countless variations seen
so it would not fatigue.
So as the 18th century
proceeded on apace,
though many dances left the scene,
it found a humble place
within sonatas and,
in classic music keys
of Haydn’s, Mozart’s, Schubert’s and
Beethoven’s, symphonies.
So, though it’s rarely danced anon,
it managed thus to stay
because of who it chanced upon
as it went on its way.
Of the younger voices, Mr. Harris seems strongest, but Mr. Krusch and Mr. Gosselin show promise. Also we are very lucky to have the great normative corrective voice of Mark Stone. Despite Mr. Southerland’s reservations, I also appreciated Mr. Whidden’s analysis of Norman MacCraig’s “Summer Farm”. I think we are also lucky to have Mr. Southerland’s and Mr. Anderson’s critiques, even when they have gone astray (which is really fairly easy for any one of us to do). It’s also very exciting to have writers, in addition to those of USA, UK, Canada and Australia, those from New Zealand, South Africa, India, Singapore, Italy, etc. Mr. Mantyk does a good job in changing it up. Occasionally one of the international writers tunes us in to alternate ways that English can go. Of course, it’s important to have old work horses, like Mr. Salemi, to keep us focused, the talented, if somewhat obtuse, Mr. MacKenzie, the cheerleader Mr. Sale, the Chinese-focused Mr. Robin, and really everybody here who is striving in their own way to advance English poetry and prose. I wish I had had such a place to go to when I was writing in my twenties, my thirties, my forties, and my fifties. In the end, however, that is why I suppose I ended up writing poems, like the following, which really Mr. Mantyk, and so many others, do not like at all (I think my audience is in the future, if it is anywhere at all).
Caspar Wessel (1745-1818)
by Euclidrew Base
He was a Danish-Norse surveyor and cartographer,
who started drawing maps that showed where towns and churches were,
mills, castles, woods, roads, streams and coastlines, islands, clear and culled,
methodical, meticulous, and mathematical.
His one lone mathematics paper wasn’t valued much;
and his interpretations were not valued first as such;
triangulating Denmark, he brought vectors to the fore
and complex numbers to a graph, a rich, more gorgeous core.
Yes, Caspar Wessel was not noticed for his work in math,
though both Argand and Gauss repeated his noteworthy path.
Euclidrew Base is a poet of mathematics. My dad loved making maps and playing made-up games with them. He bequeathed to me my keen interest in the nations of the World. Even now I miss playing maps with him. Caspar Wessel’s brother, Johan Herman (1742-1785), was a poet of epigrammatic verse and a parodist of neoclassical tragedy.