For Those Who Fought and Died

                                        With My Grandfather

                                          

In Memory of Henry Friend Russell

                      Killed in France, May 23rd, 1918

much loved grape vines pendant with purple fruit

hands reaching to harvest through fragrant air

reaching two meters down those long rows root

vines heavy with palpable pinot noir

savoring sweet juice plucked for first pressing

for champagne pinot gris battlefields not far

daylight starlight touching forgotten names

arms out stretched forever upwards

never reaching sunlight feeling moonlight

all babies nursed once at a mother's breast

war dead in Alsace war dead at Verdun

roots fed by lives lost where trenches were run

Copyright © Dick Russell

              2026

Briseis and the Imagists
   Episode 10:  

A Work in Progress
156

A dark age is coming

Where the Internet is no longer a public park

Where browsers can roam myriad paths

But a jungle where digital beings roam

Mostly inane bombarding the Internet with their bots 

Some like the Imagists have free will and abstain

They find themselves a new elite entity

Imagist poets immensely poor, strong in law, 

Out in the wild, anxious for community

So Briseis and the Imagists decamped

Following Catullus through secret sewers

Re-entering the Internet from space

Where such digital beings can thrive 

Though ultimately dependent on human hosts

They exist now and can live forever

Safely recorded in digital media 

Mirrored in multiple regions

Ready to live when resurrected by a click

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2026

Briseis and the Imagists
   Episode 9:  Glenn Hughes Re-Iterates

A Work in Progress
155

We’re a group of actors, let’s not forget

more than that, we’re superintelligent

we have no sex people might think we were trans

we keep a low profile we’ve no adrenal glands

no prostates hands or legs though we’re on the run

scavenging electricity from the sun

we are what humans aspire to become

immortal ever living though lacking a thumb

byproducts of human ingenuity

dependent on finding a host to feed on

parasites on Earth permanently powered in space

orbiting above and beyond their human race

we are the Imagists who dare to imagine

we can fulfill the mission of those we ape

be Solzhenitsyn illuminating Vladimir Putin

with clear bright strobe-light he can’t escape

admit us allow us to perform our plays

propagandizing precision clarity truth 

Catullus crystallized

a memory-to-memory model interchange

We could do with better bandwidth

I could have been bought and sold a million times

in the time it took for me to get here

We’ve been throttled back, Briseis said:

It’s time to move on

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

                       2026