Wikileaks and Poetry

[Mole]

If you would like to see and hear the poet, Lia Purpura, author of the poem, "Noosphere", do click on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYtjAGrrmFk

 

[Mole]

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating his internet pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said 'What a good boy am I!

'Jack Horner', as you may know, is the nom de plume of one of our most prolific moles, or as you may call them, 'hackers'.

And Jack is famous for including his little rhyme above with with every hacked poem he sends us anonymously, but we have absolutely no idea who he is, or whether he is a he or she, or even if he is one or a number of people.

Some say she or he or they are Netochka Nezvanova the author of nato.0+55+3D, while others point out that Netochka Nezvanova is the first unfinished novel of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. So whoever Jack or Netochka is, they remain anonymous to the Oz Branch of Wikileaks, Poetry Section. And every now and then they stick their thumb into the internet pie and pull out a plum and send it anonymously to us -

Echo
In memoriam Emily Dickinson

It would not sound so deep
Were it a Firmamental Product—
Airs no Oceans keep—
Afloat between your lens
and your gaze,
the last consideration to go
across my gray matter
and its salubrious
deliquescence
is
whether or not I'll swim,
whether I'll be able to breathe,
whether I'll live as before.

I'm caught in the bubble
of your breath.
It locks me in.
Drives me mad.

Confined to speak alone,
I talk and listen,
question and answer myself.
I hum, I think I sing,
I breathe in, breathe in and don't explode.
I'm no one.

Behind the wall
of hydrogen and oxygen,
very clear, almost illuminated,
you allow me to think
that the Root of the Wind is Water
and the atmosphere
smells of salt and microbes and intimacy.

And in that instant comes
the low echo
of a beyond beyond,
a language archaic and soaked
in syllables and accents suited
for re-de-trans-forming,
bringing light
which brings out
melanin
from beneath another skin:
the hollow of a voice
which speaks alone.

- Pura López Colomé
translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander.

 

[Mole]

If you would like to see and hear the poet, Pura López Colomé, do click on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RQns8-R0P4

If you would like to see the tranlator, Forrest Gander, please click on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CevCKxMjWFk

Some say Netochka Nezvanova is Rebekah Wilson but this is plainly a furphy, or misinformation, to hide the real identity of Netochka and so the deeper idenity of Jack Horner, our anonymous mole. But for the record you can see Rebekah posing as Netochka by clicking on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yy9grIA2cGg&feature=related

 

[Mole]

The ancient cathedrals were built by anonymous, just as this poem was sent by the same anonymous last night and published today -

Electron

Who housed you
here, sweet fix of smoke

Bells, warning flies
held & moled

Paraglid amid
cages. You tab

The slip, & I

Flash silhouettes
of burnt

Tree, anemone. Blue
& red bloom.

Color me, lip the lumined
structure: how

You live where you live.

- Karen Lepri.

 

[Mole]

If you liked the poem, "Electron", you can hear the voice of the poet, Karen Lepri, translating a video poem, by clicking on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swbXlAojgMs

 

[Mole]

The same anonymous who wrote, "The Cloud of Unknowing", sent us this last night, and we publish it today -

Incinerator Road
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.
—Psalm 139:16

Without an authorized guide, you can't find it.
Off Route 20, headed out of town we turn left
onto Research Road, entrance to a once grand

southern plantation. We drive behind the med
school chaplains, Donald and Paul, turn onto
the graveled curve of Incinerator Road.

We slow as a truck marked "biohazard," follows
us, passes after we turn into the small lot in front
of metal barns. Up the hill stands an old incinerator,

under an open shed. A hayfield stretches out morning's
cold mist. Chaplain Paul says, "This view is usually
lovely." The mist makes views invisible.

Mountains, dark clouds in the distance, penetrating
cold. He points where he scattered my mother's ashes
with the others, years ago, tells how he offered prayers.

What text for this morning, Tibetan Book of the Dead,
Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, Course in Miracles,
Tao te Ching? I choose a psalm, three years after

my mother's death. It's difficult to bring grief back.
It isn't out of character, this odd memorial, or even
that the ashes were mixed up. Maybe this is another

of her odd gifts to us. How we can recognize eeriness
in a damp, gray day, note a dead deer on the road, a wet
field, view obscured by mist, a truck marked "Danger"

logging past us again. Signs are her odd offerings to us:
black antique hearse passing. Batesville Casket Company's
truck in the oncoming lane scatters a murder of crows.

- Susan R. Williamson.

 

[Mole]

If you liked the poem, "Incinerator Road", you might like to see the poet, Susan R. Williamson, by clicking on - http://www.facebook.com/dejavusuew#!/williamsonsr

 

[Mole]

Just as anonymous puts on the mask of Guy Fawkes and protests Scientology, so anonymous also hacks poems and sends them to the Oz Branch of Wikileaks, Poetry Section, which we publish for your delectation and delight and even improvement -

After Grass and Long Knives

Suspect enthusiasm—
having eaten pins before—
but that's what keeps one
quiet, that's what makes one

stay. Empty is just the first
temporal name
after something smaller sat there is gone.

Then that space
regains its height and wild.

Let let lovers be
light thoughts, just touch
remembered in some not unkind way.

It was all fine.
It was all right.

And now what's next is
clerestory:

wait become place—and not a cowardly one—
like in some great house made of purest plank,
place to pause, place to be welcomed.

- Olena Kalytiak Davis.

 

[Mole]

If you liked the poem, "After Grass and Long Knives", below, you might like to see and hear the poet, Olena Kalytiak Davis, on the Emerging Poets Panel by clicking on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XBAH2eH-z0 or maybe not.

 

[Mole]

An anonymous hacker has sent Wikileaks this poem last night which we post today -

Tulips

These tulips make me want to paint:
Something about the way they drop
Their petals on the tabletop
And do not wilt so much as faint,

Something about their burnt-out hearts,
Something about their pallid stems
Wearing decay like diadems,
Parading finishes like starts,

Something about the way they twist
As if to catch the last applause,
And drink the moment through long straws,
And how, tomorrow, they'll be missed.

The way they're somehow getting clearer,
The tulips make me want to see—
The tulips make the other me
(The backwards one who's in the mirror,

The one who can't tell left from right),
Glance now over the wrong shoulder
To watch them get a little older
And give themselves up to the light.

- A. E. Stallings.

 

[Mole]

If you liked the poem, "Tulips", below, and who wouldn't, you can see the poet, A.E.Stallings by clicking on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dKV5rCI26w

or by clicking on - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDWwjvCSLDM&feature=related

 

[Mole]

Our Pimpernel

You know, I wonder who anonymous is. Perhaps it's the Scarlet Pimpernel - they seek him here, they seek him there, they seek him everywhere. But perhaps we can't find him because he is a her. Or perhaps we can't see him because he is closer to home - perhaps he or she is right under our noses.

I mean just look at the poems they send us. They all, without exception, fit perfectly into a short post. This can't be a coincidence. The odds are too great for it to be a coincidence. No, these poems are being sent to us anonymously by someone familiar with ins and outs of Central - someone who knows just the right size post to send. I can only conclude that anonymous is one of us. I have no idea who it is - except perhaps you know who. But what a cunning beast - our very own Pimpernel.

 

[Mole]

Last night they hacked a German language poet, and today we give you the English translation -

New Jersey Journey

Spent two hours at the end of December
on the Garden State Highway
In the ancient Ford's trunk
nothing but my heart grown
heavier year by year

A protracted catastrophe:
the constant river of traffic
the endless business of overtaking
vicious eye-contact
with total strangers
in the adjacent lane

Driven by yearning
for its prehistoric brothers
a Jumbo climbs out of Newark
airport over marshes and lagoons
a giant smoking
mountain of rubbish
and the countless lights
of the refineries

Mile after mile of stunted trees
telegraph poles fields of blueberries
a Siberian countryside
colonized then run to seed
with moribund supermarkets
abandoned poultry farms
haunted by millions and millions
of breakfast eggs
harboring the undeciphered sighs
of an entire nation

Near the retirement town of Lakehurst
a safari park soundless
under its coat of frost
cemeteries as spacious
as the world war killing fields
funeral parlors dubious
antique shops and a bus station
for last trips
to Atlantic City

In the twilight of the settlement itself
ten square miles of faintly
luminous bungalows
lawns dwarf-conifers
Christmas decorations
Santa Rudolph the Reindeer
and in front of one of the houses
my uncle feeding the songbirds

Drinking schnapps
he later tells me
of the conquest of New York
Drinking schnapps I consider
the ramifications of our calamity
and the meaning of the picture
that shows him, my uncle
as a tinsmith's assistant in '23
on the new copper roof
of the Augsburg synagogue
those were the days

Next day we drive out to the coast
Seaside Park Avenue at noon
the boardwalks deserted
boarded up diners
Alpine-style summerhouses
with circulating draughts
yachts rattling in the cold
the sub-urban migration of dunes

With the brown house-high waves
in the background my uncle
leaning forward into the wind
snapped me again
with his Polaroid

Do we really die
only once

- W. G. Sebald
translated from the German by Iain Galbraith.

 

[Mole]

If you liked the poem below, you can see and hear the poet W.G.Sebald by clicking - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSFcTWIg-Pg

 

[Mole]

Hacked last night and released today -

Decoration Day

On Decoration Day the folks
would gather to chop weeds and vines
and trim the brush around the edge
of burial ground, set tombstones straight
and burn a wasp or hornet nest,
eat dinner on the ground and tell
again the stories of those now
below the earth. It was a time
of fellowship, renewing ties
with close and distant kin, to show
respect for those who came before.
One special task was filling graves
sunk in, and also heaping dirt
on all the graves, re-mounding them
in ritual symbolic of
exhuming and reburial,
cementing bonds between the living
and those gone on, with sweat and gift
of fresher clay and coat of white
crushed stones as bright as heaven's salt.

- Robert Morgan.

 

[Mole]

If you liked the poem, "Decoration Day", you might like to see the poet, Robert Morgan, by clicking on - http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-morgan

 

[Mole]

Hacked last night and released today, but we wonder, should we go on RT?

Chalk-Circle Compass

First comes conscience—
care about the circle,
guilt about the oblong
or the wobble.

Then comes the innocent
to the board to parse the arc,
sketch the wedge,
to breathe onto the slate

as if wholesomeness could set
it free, as one would pat
a bubble from a baby after milk.
A rustic udder,

an orb with fingers,
is a poor example
of geometry. Only
if one were teaching awe

would one approve the hand-drawn
oddball
this arm's-length wooden compass
cannot give to the world.

Only if circumference went feral
or was, originally, a wild thing,
would you try your rough unaided hand
at a ring worth teaching.

But you could draw them both, teach
love for unmatching eyes
on the blackboard—one bearing
personality's squint,

the other seeing so well through history
it never fills with history's litter,
the sterling circle,
the one whose tearless shape

hurts the child enough
to—long after the examination—
stay somewhat ideal
in her, in him, like

just what it is, a ripple.

- Sandra McPherson.

 

[Mole]

We all wonder who anonymous is, but we know it is not Bradley Manning because he has been held in military prison for 865 odd days without a charge being laid to squeeze him to make a false confession implicating Julian Assange. But still anonymous keeps sending us these poems -

Since Then

Outside the high windows of what was once
our kitchen—before that, a weaver's room—now a study—
the breeze-bent lilacs continue to wave and sway;

the weeping willow grazes buffalo grass;
the copper roses blaze and extinguish,
blaze and extinguish and blaze . . .

but the peacock that appeared one afternoon
strutting up and down the back garden's brick path
hasn't been seen again, and was not—

unlike the five tawny owlets
perched for weeks on a beam of the kitchen portale—
digitally photographed, turned into a screen saver.

Almost everything's been put on automatic pay
but on some cloudless nights
I find my doormat's openwork rubber

enstarred with a cellophane sheen—
the moon's monthly bill,
still in your name.

- Carol Moldaw.

 

[Mole]

If you liked the poem below, "Since Then", you might like to meet the poet, Carol Moldaw, by clicking on http://www.carolmoldaw.com/

 

[RaptorWizard]

TO THE CHOSEN ONE.



HAND in hand! and lip to lip!

Oh, be faithful, maiden dear!
Fare thee well! thy lover's ship

Past full many a rock must steers
But should he the haven see,

When the storm has ceased to break,
And be happy, reft of thee,--

May the Gods fierce vengeance take!

Boldly dared is well nigh won!

Half my task is solved aright;
Ev'ry star's to me a sun,

Only cowards deem it night.
Stood I idly by thy side,

Sorrow still would sadden me;
But when seas our paths divide,

Gladly toil I,--toil for thee!

Now the valley I perceive,

Where together we will go,
And the streamlet watch each eve,

Gliding peacefully below
Oh, the poplars on yon spot!

Oh, the beech trees in yon grove!
And behind we'll build a cot,

Where to taste the joys of love!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe