It's really kind of amazing that someone went out and found these people from all over the world.
My random scroll brought me to Aasmund Olavsson Vinje (1818-1870) from Norway.
Aasmund Olavsson Vinje was an essayist and poet. He was born in Vinje in 1818, and made a reputation for himself as a journalist. He earned a law degree, became an attorney, and founded the periodical, Dølen in 1858 to promote the use of Landsmaal, a language that he used in his writing. His most well-know work is Ferdaminni fraa Sumaren 1860 (Travel Memories from the Summer of 1860).
I couldn't find any of his poems written in English so I tried another random scroll to satisfy the poetry itch.
Random scroll number 2 brought me to Malaysia and the poetry of Cecil Rajendra, poet, lawyer and human rights activist.
Cecil Rajendra was born in Penang, but spent the better part of his childhood in Tanjong Tokong. Rajendra received his formal education at St. Xavier's Institution, University of Singapore and Lincoln's Inn (London) where he qualified as a barrister-at-law. Rajendra is viewed as a pioneer of legal aid in Malaysia and has served as chairman of the Malaysian Bar Council's legal Aid Scheme and the Penang Lawyers' Human Rights Group.
He is the author of some 15 collections of poetry, including: Broken Buds (Goa, India: The Other India Press, 1994); Papa Moose's Nursery Rhymes for our Times (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1991); Lovers, Lunatics & Lalang (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1989); Dove on Fire: Poems on Peace, Justice and Ecology (Geneva: WCC Publications, 1987); Child of the Sun: And Other Poems (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1986); Songs for the Unsung: Poems on Unpoetic Issues Like War and Want and Refugees (Geneva: World Council of Churches, 1983); Hour of Assassins & Other Poems (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1983); Refugees & Other Despairs (Singapore: Choice Books, 1980);Bones and Feathers (Hong Kong: Heinemann, 1978); Eros & Ashes: A Cycle of Love Poems (Prakriti Press, 1975); Embryo (London: Regency Press, 1965). Other books include: Bibliography and Selected Profiles, Reviews, Essays (London: Bogle-L'Ouverture, 1985)
There is a rumour that in the rainy season ghosts stalk the corridors of these condominiums.
And is it any wonder. . . .
Decades before bulldozers muscled their territory a family of raintrees camped these foothills.
Limb by limb torn from their land stripped and decapitated their grounds cemented over, what could they do, these uprooted spirits, but inhabit the man's condominium.
And now, in the rainy season there is a rumour. . . . in the nightwind you can hear the trees howling their dispossession.
Chainsaw Massacre
Our penal code has 78 sections covering every type of hurt to person: from grievous bodily harm to murder assault, unnatural offences to abduction
. But what law, what injunction will halt this rape, this slaughter of innocent pines--these virgins whose pale trunks, like a shoal of carcasses after a massacre in a river dumped, roll downstream to unholy dismemberment in sawmills-- those new-age abbatoirs of our Century.
Hothouse Anachronisms
"Slash and Burn Vandals" they branded us in treatise, journal, book and exegesis. And yes, we confess we were guilty of felling trees to meet our daily needs: fuel to simmer our gruel, on cold nights firewood to keep us warm. . . .
But vandals we never were, we never took any more than absolute essentials. Never! Yet, "Slash and Burn Vandals" they branded us in treatise after treatise, book, journal, exegesis. . . . the well-intentioned environmentalists in the metropolis.
Never once questioning the hectare upon hectare of our forests filched to feed those voracious presses that churned out magazines, journals, books, treatises, papers and exegeses that condemned us as savages-- unthinking, unfeeling "Slash & Burn Vandals."