KING DOM’S DREAM KINGDOM

by Radice Lebewsu

The award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, who was wounded last week in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant, has died from her injuries. Tributes to both Amelina’s activism and her writing poured in from across the worlds of literature and politics, after PEN Ukraine announced she had died in a hospital in Dnipro, surrounded by friends and family. Amelina, 37, won the Joseph Conrad literary prize in 2021 for works including Dom’s Dream Kingdom and had been nominated for other major awards including the European Union Prize for Literature. She largely set aside her writing after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, to focus on documenting war crimes and working with children on or near the frontline. —The Guardian, July 3, 2023

            “In death’s dream kingdom…”
                        —T. S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
            “Faith is…absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.”
                        —Stanisław Lem, The Star Diaries
 

Ukrainian Victoria Amelina has died
from injuries along with others; it was dinnertime.
It happened in the city Kramatorsk, more death, more grime,
another dozen dead at th’ restaurant where they had dined.
She had been documenting Russian war crimes for a year,
her prose attempting dealing with the horror and the fear,
like as her fellow writer Vakulenko tried to do, 
when he was killed in Izium in 2022,
his diary found buried underneath a cherry tree,
unchopped, like those in Chekhov’s arbour… arbitrarily.

Radice Lebewsu, an anagrammatic heteronym of Bruce Dale Wise, is a poet fond of Ukraine.

2022 WINTER OLYMPICS

by Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei

Read: "What Uyghur Americans Want You to Know about the Olympic Games" from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

As the wIntér oLympics cLOSE for 2022,

the Covid Bubble popped, and Xi Jinping’s Beijing fling’s through,

the teams returned, some to their lands where real snow oft occurs,

remembering the food and quarantines with heartfelt stirs.

Though typical concerns and controversies happened still,

false starts, missed calls, falls, dope disquals, and jumpsuits on the hills,

the WINter Games participants were “free” and far from strife,

Tibet, HongKong and Xinjiang. There was no loss of life.

Bing Dwen Dwen, frozen in his space clothes, with his constant smile,

embodying ice purity, has waved good-bye in style.

 

Lu “Reed ABCs” Wei is poet of China, an anagrammatic heteronym of Bruce Dale Wise. “Reed ABCs” is his art name (hào).

SHIPWRECK OFF THE COAST OF AFRICA

by Eswer El Cubadi

At least 52 people died after a boat carrying around 180 refugees and migrants sank off the coast of Tunisia on Saturday. UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, is deeply saddened at this latest tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea and is concerned about the high number of people dying on the Central Mediterranean route with over 700 dead or missing so far in 2018. —UNHCR, June 5, 2018; Meanwhile, Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini (in photo) says he will stop migrants trying to reach Europe via Sicily. – EPA pic, June 4, 2018.

            "Can I escape from fell Charybdis and ward Scylla off?"
                        —Homer, Odyssey, Book 12, Lines 115, Odysseus to Circe


At Sfax, the news was horrible—five dozen dead—and more,
near to Kerkennah Island off of north Tunisia's shore.
Increasingly the human traffickers launch people from
Tunisia, now that Libya is tighter than a drum.
The boat was packed with migrants fleeing Africa to be
free from the lives they do not like for hope in Italy.
But, o, alas, the relatives of those who learned the worst,
their souls, like Dido's when Aeneas left her, are accursed.
But further off, up north, Salvini said at Sicily,
"We will no longer be the camp for Europe's refugees."

SUE GRAFTON

by Bruce Dale Wise

 Sue Grafton
April 24, 1940 - December 28, 2017

So softly, Sue Grafton, among these blue days,
so softly I sing a brief song for your praise.
I'm sitting beside passing video streams;
so softly, Sue Grafton, you're gone with old dreams.

Your Kinsey Milhone is now left among words,
beneath scudding jet planes, occasional birds,
like the cac-kl-ing black grac-kles sitting on stores;
I'm thinking of mysteries, Hitchcock's and yours.

From A is for Alibi, Y's Yesterday,
from movies and ghost writers you kept at bay.
Now you have vanished and gone from the light;
Z is for Zero books you have to write.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet, essayist, and the creator of new poetic forms. His publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms.

OUTSIDE THE TURKISH AMBASSADOR'S HOUSE

by Bruce Dale Wise

Source: The New York Times

Outside the Turk ambassador's house, Erdogan looked on,
while a man came to Ceren Borazan with open arms.
He was drawn to her chanting voice. He grabbed her from behind,
and gripped her neck so tightly, she was scared out of her mind.
The people suffering in Turkey, far way from them,
when he was yelling—kill you, bitch—they could not have heard him.

The men in suits, the bodyguards of Tayyip Erdogan,
had come to roust protesters out—Kurds and Armenians.
Attackers kicked one woman as she lay curled on a walk;
Abbas Aziz, a teacher, got a lesson in free talk.
He was knocked to the ground by men, and kicked in chest and head.
This is America, this is not Ankara, he said.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet, essayist, and the creator of new poetic forms. His publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms.

DEATH COMES FOR THE COMMANDANT

by Bruce Dale Wise

Castro will be buried at the Santa Ifigenia cemetery in southern Cuba. Photograph: Jonathan Watts/The Guardian.

        "Cambiar de amos no es ser libre..."

                —José Martí

The flags are at half-mast, beside the palms out in the air.
The Sun is shining over Revolutionary Square.
The people stroll about, meandering. Not much has changed.
The silence shows. The individuals are rearranged.
The statues and the towers, still, remain . . . another day.
The avenues, the walkways, and the latest news are gray,
as are his ashes, his cigars: Fidel Castro is dead.
Havana cannot hold him longer in white, blue, and red.
It's time to go, to leave the capital, alone, uncoil,
to Santa Ifigenia in Santiago soil.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and essayist who writes under various charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms). The creator of new poetic forms, like the tennos (10 lines of iambic heptametre), his publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms. This tennos is an example of his docupoetry. Among poets he admires are Cubans José Martí and Nicolás Guíllen.

POKÉMON GO TO SYRIA

by Bruce Dale Wise

After more than five years of war, Syrians appear to be using the wildly popular Pokémon Go in a desperate effort to draw attention to their country’s conflict. . . . They’re holding paper signs with pictures of Pokemon characters, and calling on people to save them. “I am in Kafr Nabl on the outskirts of Idlib, come and save me,” one sign says, echoing phrases on a handful of others. It’s unclear who, or what group, was behind the images. But they bear the logo of the RFS, which is self-described online as the Revolutionary Forces of Syria Media Office that “reports on the Syrian revolution professionally and objectively,” according to its Twitter account. It appears to be affiliated with the Syrian opposition. The images were also circulated by other accounts affiliated with the opposition, which has been fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his regime since 2011. “I never imagined we would like to become a game in order to gain the world’s attention,” a Twitter account called Children of Syria posted on Wednesday, with the pictures of the children. —Vocative.com, July 21, 2016

"I am from Kafr Nabl in Idlib," the placard said.

"Come save me from the horror of the Syrian Bomb Squad."

For more than five long years the war in Syria has gone.

"O, come and help us if you can. Come save us, Pokémon."

"Let us be free from misery and all this violence—

Bashar Assad, Islamic State, and deadly Nusra Front."

But there beside the bombed out building boarded up with boards,

a boy sits by a Pokémon with tears as large as gourds.

It's but a picture in a picture—worth a thousand words;

and overhead the barrel bombs fly with the thunderbirds.

Bruce Dale Wise is a poet and essayist who writes under various charichords (anagrammatic heteronyms). The creator of new poetic forms, like the tennos (10 lines of iambic heptametre), his publication credits include magazines and ezines under his own name and various pseudonyms. This tennos is an example of his docupoetry.