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Newsflash:

StarPoet Newsletter Vol. XI, No. XLVI

Sunday, 14 November 2010 00:00 Last Updated on Saturday, 13 November 2010 23:08

The StarPoet Newsletter
Vol. XI, No. XLVI (November 14, 2010 C.E.)

mid november, late fall, early winter Veteran's Day fell midweek so I will attempt to do it right

Orion has shifted horizons
Chasing the seasons across the sky
In a few short months
The winter's new snow cover
Will place me a few feet closer
To the heavens
And then, after a time
The world will thaw
When Orion comes visiting
Once again in the East

Lisa Jain Thompson c. 2010 C.E.

listening to Bach, preludes and fugues, church organ fully piped I am surrounded by counterpoint, floating free

the human family

Sisters and Brothers

All of our sisters and all of our brothers
Were better loved by our parents than we were;
They got all the cool presents and all the free passes
While we had to work for their love;
And the last piece of pie was always theirs for the taking
While we ate the crumbs off our plate;
They had the new car, the nice clothes, and the money,
But Mom called us first when Dad died.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

There is a spookier possibility. Suppose it is easy to send messages to the past, but that forward causality also holds (i.e. past events determine the future). In one way of reasoning about it, a message sent to the past will "alter" the entire history following its receipt, including the event that sent it, and thus the message itself. Thus altered, the message will change the past in a different way, and so on, until some "equilibrium" is reached--the simplest being the situation where no message at all is sent. Time travel may thus act to erase itself (an idea Larry Niven fans will recognize as "Niven's Law").

Hans Moravec, a gloss on Niven's Law

I no longer have to wonder what would have happened if McCovey's line drive had been two feet to the right. Yay Giants!

Baseball on the Grass

Baseball on the grass, frost in the evenings,
The boys of summer slip deeper into fall;
A month into football, a fifth of a season gone,
(which, of course, started in the August heat),
The World Series is still a week or more away.

Welcome to the glorious new world
Where the calendar is next to meaningless
And music is downloaded out of thin air
As we follow our favorite sports teams
On our data saturated smart phones.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

daring time

Out of a Cavern, Endlessly Howling

When I am done,
When I am dead, dead and gone,
I hope I will have left
A dozen poems, maybe more,
That will stand against
The best I have read.

No one reads all of Will's sonnets,
Except for scholars in dire need,
Most of us recognize only a handful or so
Out of his hundred and a half:
After the lilacs bloom and the captain sails,
Who really knows Leaves of Grass?

A single poem of Sappho's survives,
Bits and pieces of her life;
More of the Green Hills
And Clementine exists
Than the poet widely praised
In the ancient world and this.

I will not go gently into oblivion,
I will not surrender to time and taste,
I write because I must, silence would kill me,
And the words that demand to be versed,
If I were, for some reason, to ignore them,
Would swiftly drive me insane.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

Down By The River Liv'd A Maiden
(1863)

Down by the river there lived a maiden,
In a cottage built just seven by nine,
And all around this lubly bower,
The beauteous sunflower blossoms twine.

Her foot, Oh! Golly! Twas a beauty,
Her shoes were made of Dig-by pine,
Two herring boxes without the tops on
Just made the sandals of Clementine.

Now ebry night down by the riber,
Her ghostess walks long half past nine
I know tis her a kase I tracked her,
And by de smell tis Clementine.

Oh! my Clema, Oh! my Clema,
Oh! my darling Clementine,
Now you are gone and lost forever,
I'm dreadful sorry Clementine.

-- Henry S. Thompson, Minstrel Show Songwriter

carnivale

The Eye of Heaven

Sit down
Around
The Top
Around
The Bottom
Again then back
Above it all

In the trees below
The coaster rises
Screaming dives
Back down
Twisting as she goes

The great wheel pauses,
Eye to eye with starlight,
Silent except for the wind
And the metal on metal creak
Of inevitable disaster

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

Oh My Darling, Clementine
(1864)

In a cavern, in a canyon,
Excavating for a mine
Dwelt a miner forty niner,
And his daughter Clementine.

Light she was and like a fairy,
And her shoes were number nine,
Herring boxes, without topses,
Sandals were for Clementine

In my dreams she still doth haunt me,
Robed in garments soaked in brine;
How in life I used to hug her,
Now she's dead, and I draw the line.

Oh my darling, Oh my darling,
Oh my darling, Clementine,
You are lost and gone forever,
Dreadful sorry, Clementine.

-- Percy Montrose

grounded in ancient craft

Everything Up To Date!

Now with modern technology!
Each word individually texted
And posted on a Facebook wall;
Each line specifically twittered
To ten thousand breathers,
Revised and refried
Before carefully being refitted
Into verses and stanzas
Of electronical variance
That are then vetted by
Multiple internet organization
Via access to the world wide wi-fi
For political correctness,
Current topicality, and the
Potential of the subsequent
You Tube video to go viral.
Then, after all this is done,
I run it all through my brain
And write the poem the muse demands
As we have for the last five thousand years.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

letting the poet be

All I Ask of Dying

After I die you can desecrate
My body, such as you will,
But don't disturb these bones,
Don't throw them out,
Until two hundred years have gone;
That should be enough time
For the world to come back to me:
If not, I won't give a damn,
Will I?

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

Niven's Law:

If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe.

Niven's Laws (from Known Space)

(a) Never throw shit at an armed man.
(b) Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man.

Never fire a laser at a mirror.

Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun.

F x S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa.

Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.

It is easier to destroy than create.

Any damn fool can predict the past.

History never repeats itself.

Ethics change with technology.

Anarchy is the least stable of social structures. It falls apart at a touch.

There is a time and place for tact.

The ways of being human are bounded but infinite.

The world's dullest subjects, in order:

(a) Somebody else's diet.
(b) How to make money for a worthy cause.
(c) Special Interest Liberation.

The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently.

Niven's corollary: The gene-tampered turkey you're talking to isn't necessarily one of them.

Fuzzy Pink Niven's Law: Never waste calories.

There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it.

in variant form in Fallen Angels as "Niven's Law: No cause is so noble that it won't attract fuggheads." No technique works if it isn't used.

Not responsible for advice not taken.

Old age is not for sissies.

-- Drawn from Known Space: The Future Worlds of Larry Niven

true life

The Freiherr

Richthofen lands, slips into history,
A single .303 bullet in his side,
Shot down in a dog fight,
Shot down from the ground,
As he flew over Morlancourt Ridge.

After eighty victories in aerial combat,
Shot down near Vaux-sur-Somme,
The Flying Circus at an end,
The Baron's life came kaputt,
A red albatross around his neck.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

swimming upstream

Give Me Some Milk or Else Go Home

The trouble with being on the cutting edge
Is that you bleed a lot, especially if what
You are doing is so far ahead of the moment
That everyone thinks you are being retro;
Not that that is anyone's fault, you have to
Grasp onto whatever you can grasp
And if your only frame of reference
Is something you've already seen,
Well, of course, you're going to miss what's
Really been going down all these years,
Even more so if you are one of those
Blessed souls who thinks the world begins
And ends with Steve Jobs and Apple Inc.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

When did Halloween morph from a joyfully mean-spirited event involving fear, extortion and vandalism into the modern feel-good, squeaky-clean, everyone's-a-winner variant, where children find it appropriate to dress not as rotting dead things but as, say, "fairy princesses," and no one says boo? I don't know when it happened, but I don't like it.

In my downtown, gentrified Washington neighborhood, there is at least a little tension. Many of the trick or treaters are driven in from less affluent areas, presumably because the pickings around here are better.

Some are teens who don't bother to wear costumes. This all makes some of the locals feel a little put-upon, which puts their earnest, egalitarian white liberal souls at war with their senses of middle-class entitlement. It all tends to all work out fine, but not without some angst and grumbles. I rather enjoy the show.

At 10 p.m. on Halloween night, my son, Dan, and I were loading something into his car in front of our house when a caravan of boys rode by on bikes. They were about 15. One of them yelled, "Happy Halloween, motherfuckerss," and flung an egg at us. It splattered the car.

Dan and I agreed it was the most authentic Halloween moment of our lives.

-- Gene Weingarten

family

The Coming Holidays

The turkeys have been ordered,
The plans are being made,
The temperature outside
Is slowly dropping;
It won't be too long
Until the family's all here
And all that will be left
Are the arguments.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

for those who are gone, for those who have served and those who still serve, and for all those who will serve in future wars on whatever planet we be on at the time

Fresher Fields Than Flanders

A poet, as heaven burns red in the fields,
Must cross the wire, body and soul,
Capturing in her verse what brave
Men and women do while humanity
Safely sips their latte's and complains
About the price of cable and the vague
Facism of iPhones and Bill Gates.

Qui tollis pecata mundi ...
Qui tollis? Qui tollis?
Dona eis non requiem.

The poet floats in and out of the swirl of battle,
Absorbing the chaos, cutting through the fog,
Standing beside her best buddy in some
muddy wet trench riding in some high tech jeep
over dry desert sands watching his moment
when the bullet enters his head wiping his
blood from her blouse and eyes.

All the poet can do today is warn,
I must be truthful, all heroes are flawed,
All wars require men and women to decide
What it means to be still alive;
I do not debate that this war is necessary
Or that one borne in greed and hubris:
We die either way while war continues.

I would my family live unbloodied,
I would yours and all your cousins,
But, creatures of forest and savannah,
We have never known it so;
Nor do I expect the world to change
Within the lifetime of my children or theirs,
We are not a finished product nor can we be.

Hercules, Achilles, Audie Murphy,
The bloody Gaughans and Kilbanes,
The troubles continue seemingly without end;
At best a poet is a smuggler of arms and weapons
That might helps us survive for a week or a day
Among the holocausts and random violence
That forms the boundaries of human lives.

My tears word these verses,
Their blood colors my thoughts,
Draining me on these pages:
I would have you remember
Everything to calm a poet's pain.

— Lisa Jain Thompson (November 2010)

Beginning and ending timeline for those listed on the Viet Nam Memorial wall

* November 1, 1955 – Dwight D. Eisenhower deploys Military Assistance Advisory Group to train the South Vietnamese military units and secret police. However, the U.S. Department of Defense does not recognize such date since the men were supposedly only training the Vietnamese. The officially recognized date is the formation of the Military Assistance Command Viet-Nam, better known as MACV. This marks the official beginning of American involvement in the war as recognized by the memorial.

* June 8, 1956 – The first official death in Vietnam is U.S. Air Force Technical Sergeant Richard B. Fitzgibbon, Jr. of Stoneham, MA who was killed by another U.S. airman.

* July 8, 1959 – Charles Ovnand and Dale R. Buis are killed by guerrillas at Bien Hoa while watching the film The Tattered Dress. They are listed 1 and 2 at the wall's dedication. Ovnand's name is misspelled on the memorial as "Ovnard."

* April 30, 1975 – Fall of Saigon. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs uses May 7, 1975 as the official end date for the Vietnam era as defined by Title 38 U.S. Code Section 101.

* May 15, 1975 – 18 Marines are killed on the last day of a rescue operation known as the Mayagüez incident with troops from the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. They are the last servicemen listed on the timeline.