“Uprising” – Poem by Saint Lucian Poet John Robert Lee

15 Sunday Feb 2026

Tags

Belmont/Trinidad & Tobago/Caribbean, Colonial and Post-colonial oppression, Environmental Degradation, Poem “Uprising” by John Robert Lee, Poetry Collection Belmont Portfolio by John Robert Lee (UK 2023), Ravaged Earth, Saint Lucia/Caribbean, Saint Lucian Poet John Robert Lee, Western exploitation

Saint Lucian Poet John Robert Lee
Photo Credit: The Voice St. Lucia News / Photo by Tara Lucien

My Poetry Corner February 2026 features the poem “Uprising” from the poetry collection Belmont Portfolio by poet, preacher, and retired teacher and librarian John Robert Lee, published by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2023). Born in 1948 in the Caribbean Island nation of Saint Lucia, he majored in English and French Literature, including Caribbean Literature, at the University of the West Indies in Barbados (Cave Hill Campus) and Jamaica (Mona Campus) in the early 1980s.

Ordained in 1997 as an Elder of Calvary Baptist Church, Lee continues to be active in his local Baptist Church where he preaches occasionally. While he remains connected to the pulse of Caribbean literature and the arts, he is no longer actively involved in theatre and broadcasting as he once was. Father of three children, he lives with his wife in Saint Lucia.

During an exclusive interview with Caribbean Writers and Poets Magazine in November 2023 to talk about his poetry collection Belmont Portfolio, Lee said:

“I explore my world and what is happening in it, Caribbean and international; my culture and its history, its music, both traditional and contemporary, its life in all that complexity; my own personal experiences of maturing, aging, and my ever-deepening faith.”

Belmont in the title is a historical and cultural neighborhood in northeast Port of Spain, capital of the Caribbean Republic of Trinidad & Tobago. During his stay in Belmont, while attending the Caribbean Festival of Arts (CARIFESTA) in 2019, Lee took photos of the area that later inspired a series of ekphrastic poems.

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The Changing Earth – Awareness

08 Sunday Feb 2026

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Anthropogenic Climate Disruption, Human Behavior, Nature and the Environment

≈ 43 Comments

Tags

Ancestral trauma, Awareness, Indigenous knowledge and wisdom, Indigenous Voices, The Changing Earth

Apusiaajik Glacier – Greenland – NASA Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) Mission – 2016-2021
Photo Credit: NASA Sea Level Change: Observations from Space

This is the first article in my series about our changing Earth from interviews with Native Americans shared in We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth, edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth (USA 2022). My presentation does not follow the order of the interviews.

# 1: Raquel Ramirez (Ho-Chunk, Ojibwe, Lenca) – Awareness
(Chapter 4, pp. 48-60)

Born on that memorable day of September 11, 2001, Raquel Ramirez is the youngest participant interviewed via Skype during the pandemic lockdown in midsummer 2020. She defines herself as an urban Native American, Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe, and other strong Native family roots. Growing up in California, she’s greatly influenced by the state’s indigenous cultures.

In addressing the crises we face on our changing Earth, Raquel considers awareness as a challenge to confront and overcome. Breaking free of ignorance in society and our own ignorance is, she acknowledges, an emotional and difficult process.

Awareness doesn’t just mean listening or hearing or recognizing. It is very much being present and being conscious of people beyond you!

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“Jaguar Song” – Poem by Asian American Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

18 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Poetry, United States

≈ 36 Comments

Tags

Asian American poet, Into the Hush by Arthur Sze, Poem “Jaguar Song” by Arthur Sze, Santa Fe/New Mexico/USA, United States Poet Laureate Arthur Sze (2025-2026)

Asian American Poet Laureate Arthur Sze 2025-2026
Photo Credit: U.S. Library of Congress (Photo by Shawn Miller)

My Poetry Corner January 2026 features the poem “Jaguar Song” from the twelfth poetry collection Into the Hush by Arthur Sze, Poet Laureate of the United States 2025-2026. He is the first Asian American to serve in this position. The following excerpts of poems are all sourced from this collection which explores humanity’s impact on Mother Nature together with glimpses of her untouched beauty.

Listen—in an Anchorage night, / a crunching resembling cars colliding, / and, as the incoming tide slaps, / you will never forget inlet ice breakup; black spruce branches are etched / against the sky; far from a city lined / with fast-food spots, bars, and pawnshops, […] you marvel at the green translucency / of leaves, the mystery of photosynthesis; / as grief and joy well up, you step / into the vernal sharpening of the day— / apricot trees are the first to bloom. (Poem “Spring View” p. 5).

Born in 1950 in New York City to Chinese immigrants, Sze is an award-winning poet with twelve books of poetry published, a translator of classical Chinese poetry, and editor. His journey to becoming a poet began in 1968 during his first semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he was pursuing a career in the sciences. As he tells it during an interview in 2025 with Jim Natal for Marsh Hawk Press:

“I sat in a large calculus class and felt increasingly bored by the lecture. I remember flipping to the back of a spiral notebook, and I started writing phrases to a poem. I was excited at what came to me, and, before the end of class, I had a rough draft…”

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The Writer’s Life: New Monthly Series on the Changing Earth

11 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Nature and the Environment, Recommended Reading, The Writer's Life

≈ 50 Comments

Tags

Documentary Film From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brothers’ Warning (BBC 1990), Environmental Crisis, Hopi Elder Thomas Banyacya (1909-1999), Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp-Tekaronianeken (1940-2010), Mother Earth, Muskogee-Creek Elder Phillip Deere (1929-1985), North American Indigenous Voices

Front Cover: ***We Are the Middle of Forever: Indigenous Voices from Turtle Island on the Changing Earth*** – Edited by Dahr Jamail and Stan Rushworth
Published by The New Press, New York, USA, 2022

During the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Dahr Jamail – an American award-winning journalist and environmental advocate – and Stan Rushworth – an elder and retired teacher of Cherokee descent living in Northern California – interviewed several people from different North American Indigenous cultures and communities, generations, and geographic. Their featured collection of interviews offers us a wide variety of perspectives on a much more integrated relationship to Earth and all human and non-human beings.

Turtle Island is a term used by some Indigenous peoples, primarily those in North America, to refer to the continent. This name stems from various Indigenous creation stories which describe the landmass as being formed on the back of a giant turtle. The concept of Turtle Island is deeply significant in many Native American cultures as it reflects their spiritual beliefs and relationship with Mother earth.

As inhabitants of these lands for thousands of generations before the arrival of European conquistadores and colonizers, Native Americans carry in their ancestral memories the rise and fall of great civilizations before ours. They have much to teach us about surviving collapse and healing our broken relationship with Mother Earth.

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Year 2025: Reflections

04 Sunday Jan 2026

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in The Writer's Life, United States

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

AI Revolution, Censorship, Earthrise, Mother Earth, New Global Order, Overcoming adversity, Storyteller Rosaliene Bacchus, Year 2025

***Earthrise*** – NASA Apollo 8 – December 24, 1968 – Photo by Astronaut William Anders
Source Credit – Wikipedia

I’m still trying to process everything that has happened since the Earthrise on January 20, 2025. The punches were fast, violent, and relentless. They upended the global order established at the end of World War II. European allies have been left out in the cold to face what was once our mutual Cold War adversary. North American allies are treated with contempt. Venezuela’s coveted vast oil reserves have transformed the Caribbean Sea into a danger zone. How did we get here?

Sorry Greenland. The sovereignty of nations be damned. Your rare-earth metals are essential to our technological advancement. Our Big Tech giants are in a race to colonize Mars and the vast expanse of space beyond. They need these metals to build and power their AI machines. They also need lots of energy (and water) to operate their vast AI data centers.

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“The Day of Revolution” – Poem by Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das

23 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Guyana, Poetry

≈ 44 Comments

Tags

A Leaf in His Ears: Collected Poems by Mahadai Das (UK 2010), Guyana/Caribbean Poet, Guyana’s Authoritarian Regime (1974-1992), Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das (1954-2003), Poetry Collection My Finer Steel Will Grow by Mahadai Das (1982)

Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das (1954-2003)
Photo Credit: Peepal Tree Press (UK)

My Poetry Corner November 2025 features the poem “The Day of Revolution” from the poetry collection My Finer Steel Will Grow (1982) by Guyanese poet and teacher Mahadai Das; included in the posthumous publication of her work (1976-1994) A Leaf in His Ears: Collected Poems by Peepal Tree Press (UK, 2010). All excerpts of her poems are taken from the Peepal 2010 publication.

Born in 1954 in Eccles on the East Bank Demerara, Guyana, Mahadai’s father was a rice farmer. She attended the prestigious Bishops High School for girls in the capital, Georgetown, where she began writing poetry. Then in 1971, her mother died while giving birth to her tenth child, leaving Mahadai, then seventeen, with responsibility for her siblings. Later that year (November), she was crowned as the “Miss Diwali” beauty-queen. What a boost that must’ve been for the adolescent Mahadai!

In the early 1970s, while taking care of her siblings, Das earned her BA at the University of Guyana and became a volunteer member of the Guyana National Service.

Disillusioned with the corruption and authoritarianism of Burnham’s regime (1974-1985), she became involved with the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), co-founded by Walter Rodney (1942-1980), an African historian and political activist. In the poem “Militant” from her debut poetry collection I Want to be a Poetess of My People (1977), Das declares her commitment to joining the fight for change in Guyana (pp. 39-40):

Militant I am / Militantly I strive. / I want to march in my revolution, / I want to march with my brothers and sisters. / Revolution firing my song of freedom. / I want my blood to churn / Change! Change! Change!… // Child of the revolution! I want to grow… grow… grow! / I want to grow for my revolution. / I want to march for my country!

In her quest to grow professionally to better serve her country, Das left Guyana to obtain her MA at Columbia University, New York. After earning her MA, she began a doctoral program in Philosophy at the University of Chicago, Illinois. While there, she became critically ill and never completed the program.

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Thought for Today: Tecno-dreams of Space Colonies

16 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Recommended Reading, Technology

≈ 45 Comments

Tags

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), Author and Astrophysicist Adam Becker, Effective Altruism (EA), Longtermism, Singularity, Tech billionaires, Techno-dreams of Space Colonies

Front Cover *More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity* by Adam Becker (USA, 2025)
Photo Credit: Hachette Book Group

[Tech billionaires] will keep looking for ways to extend their control over the world unless they are curtailed. Their dreams are dreams of endless capitalism of the most brutal sort, because they know that such a system would allow them to win still more money and power. This is another reason it’s difficult to imagine a future other than the ones they promote: as the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism….

This is why the tech billionaires tell us their futures are inevitable: to keep us from remembering that no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. They want to establish a permanent plutocracy, a tyranny of the lucky, through their machines. They are too credulous and short-sighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now….

Excerpt from More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity by Adam Becker, published by Hachette Book Group, New York, USA, 2025, pp. 288-289.

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The Writer’s Life: Totally Spooked!

02 Sunday Nov 2025

Posted by Rosaliene Bacchus in Technology, The Writer's Life

≈ 74 Comments

Tags

Chinese hackers, Cyberwarfare, Internet bots, Malicious bots, WordPress blog

Internet Robots or Bots
Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

China
A pacing threat¹ to American hegemony
slashed with tariffs of 100 percent
—then not.

Chinese hackers
masters of Cyberwarfare
launched Salt Typhoon²
reported in October 2024
worst telecom hack in America’s history
at least eight telecom companies infiltrated.

My little WordPress blog
grabbed viewers from China
four on August 8 then
climbed to 96 by August 30.

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Three Worlds One Vision

~ Guyana – Brazil – USA

“Uprising” – Poem by Saint Lucian Poet John Robert Lee

The Changing Earth – Awareness

“Jaguar Song” – Poem by Asian American Poet Laureate Arthur Sze

The Writer’s Life: New Monthly Series on the Changing Earth

Year 2025: Reflections

“The Day of Revolution” – Poem by Guyanese Poet Mahadai Das

Thought for Today: Tecno-dreams of Space Colonies

The Writer’s Life: Totally Spooked!