Wise Words with Bruce Wise


Michael Faraday
by R. Lee Ubicwedas

He read the books he bound, young Michael Faraday the drab,
obtaining an assistantship in Humphrey Davy’s lab,
experimenting with the flows of electricity,
discovering suspended magnets moved circularly,
inventing thus the dynamo in 1821,
producing an electric current through induction’s run,
devising laws in chemistry, with other fruitful yields,
describing forces of electric and magnetic fields,
suggesting that all of reality was limned and lined.
By thinking through the facts, he formed a poem in the mind.


R. Lee Ubicwedas is a universalist poet. His interests span the universe, a cue he takes from Eratosthenes.


Reflection For Inflectionists

in memory of Marianne Moore and Archibald MacLeish
by Ubs Reece Idwal

Like Langur monkey footprints left on Poon Hill in Nepal,
a poem’s language should be subtle, hardly there at all.
Like letter b in subtle, or the letter e there too,
a poem’s language should be hidden in an airy view.
Like the arriving of a driving, thrusting, bursting force,
a poem’s language should be awesome as it takes its course.
Like lovely rings of beige and yellow barely entered in,
a poem’s language should be pressed forth, and when centered, spin.
Like lofty lifts that softly sift through taut tautologies,
a poem’s language should be dripping with mythology.


O, India
by Sri Wele Cebuda

It is so great, while lumbering and slumbering along,
an elephant upon the land, this Bollywood in song.
It is a populated and polluted, sloppy place;
yet beautiful and gorgeous are the colours of its space.
O, India, where are you at, now as you go through time—
a drunken mixture of insanity and the sublime?
Your beauty is amazing, grand…as is your ugliness.
You are a wonder to behold, a muggy, jungling mess.
I must confess, I love your cultured hell, your tiger’s tooth
that springs at me with all the violence of blinding truth.


Sri Wele Cebuda is a lover of India, fascinated by its colour, its energy, and its capacity for change, which are at the centre of his vision of the World. He has been influenced by figures, such as Rabindranath Tagore and Srinivasa Ramanujan, and has long been a lover of its culture and its power, as can be seen in a quote of his, “In India, diamonds are everywhere.”


by Saudi Becrewel

The mother of all villages was built around
400 AD. Islamic tradition claims
that Abraham and Ishmael, within the town
Bakkah, built the big Kaaba cube back in the day,
2000 BC. Since then, Mohammed called it,
630 AD, holy. The hajj then became
one of the pillars in the worship of Allah.
Now millions pray to it from all around the world,
that which had been inhabited once by Hubal.
Each year that rock within its heart around is swirled
by millions in the Masjid al-Haram, all bound
below the modern buildings rising up unfurled.


Saudi Becrewel is a poet of Saudi Arabia, including Mohammad bin Salman, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, who secured this year, for Saudi Arabia, when Donald Trump visited, its biggest arms deal in history worth over $300,000,000,000.


The Minuet
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 whom it chanced upon
as it went on its way.


U. Carew Delibes is a poet of France and music critic of French music.


by Cawb Delius Ree

Bellagio, a luxury casino on the Strip,
in Paradise, Nevada, slot machines and stacks of chips,
above the view of fountains synchronized to melodies,
and pink-gold sunsets set in azure-glazing reveries,
seems like another world than the ordinary one,
although it’s just the same old heaven and the same old sun,
loosed from the regular and commonplace by magic’s touch,
lost in a dreamy fantasy of ample, more and much,
as long as you are willing to put out a goodly sum,
and feast on tidbits in between thick smoke, perfume and rum.


Cawb Delius Ree is a poet of Nevada.



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