Weary with Dachshunds - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Weary with Dachshunds

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 27

 

With an improving book I go to bed

                   (as P. G. Wodehouse said)

And two improving dachshunds on my pillow

                   (as Wodehouse almost said)

They then begin their journey at my head

Wriggling down to my feet and back again

 

They slurple messily from my bedside glass

And crumple up my copy of Hercule Poirot

Neither slows: they lick my nose, they tickle my toes

And will they finally doze? Nobody knows!

 

But

 

When comes the midnight moon, then all in a cuddly heap

Their little doggie noses snuffle at last in sleep

The President of Columbia University is Saddened - poem

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The President of Columbia University is Saddened

 

“Why must we fight for the right to live, over and over, each time the sun rises?”

― Leon Uris, Exodus

 

Jews are not welcome in the cool universities

The laboratories are shut against them

Libraries, classrooms, meetings, coffee shops

Here, sir, the bullhorn rules (Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!)

 

Administrators smile weakly and shrug:

We cannot guarantee your safety here

The Merovingian president says she is saddened

That Jewish students are harassed and beaten

 

The halls of academia are lined with swastikas

And 7 October is remembered with glee

The Golden Gate of Jerusalem - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Golden Gate of Jerusalem

 

The Gate of Repentance

 

The Golden Gate captures the evening moon

Which shines upon the road a convict walked

At the rubbled base a snake pursues a rat

          a very troubled rat

While Roman squaddies stand the middle watch

 

The Gate of Mercy

 

The Golden Gate captures the morning sun

Whence the Messiah comes, or comes again

He is the Gate Himself, the Golden Gate

He comes from the Mount of Olives in golden light

 

The Golden Gate has been blocked for centuries -

This will not always be so

 

A Nation of Couch Schlubs Blames the Chinese Communists - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Nation of Couch Schlubs Blames the Chinese Communists

 

A question may be brought about ownership

And the turgid content of the daily trawl

But even before the question of censorship

          One must ask:

Why is anyone on TikTok at all?

The Great Gate of Kiev - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Great Gate of Kiev

 

Mussorgsky’s The Great Gate of Kiev is no hymn to the people of Ukraine (telegraph.co.uk)

 

If there was never a Great Gate of Kiev

Except in Mussorgy’s triumphal hymn

There ought to have been, and there will be some day

Trophied with captured Putinista flags

 

For now

 

Wherever a Ukrainian enters Kiev

By rail or bus, or in worn-out army boots

He is the Gate, the Knight’s Gate, the Golden gate

With a chapel and the most wonderful bells

 

And the pictures at an exhibition

Will be ikons of Ukrainian martyrs

You are the Poem - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

You are the Poem

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 24

 

A camera time-stops images as electrical codes

Formed by Kyanon Kabushiki Gaisha

And if that is not high art, then what is?

But codes are not you in your many dimensions

 

Your dimensions of perceptions and being

Your thoughts and happiness, your eternal soul

Your way of comforting a rescue kitten

Your way of writing verse and tasting  soup

 

A camera time-stops images as electrical codes

But you are a living spring of happy odes

Stammering Before an Audience of One - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Stammering Before an Audience of One

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 23

 

As imperfect poets upon the page

We scribble limping iambs and push them to go

To an impatient audience waiting downstage

For well-spoken truth in a metric flow

 

A poem, a play - each is a rite of love

Humbly offered like an awkward child’s bouquet

Go on, then, give the rhymes a little shove

Even though your feet, your tongue, your hopes – all are clay

 

And if gratitude and admiration are in her eyes

She has granted you the worthiest prize!

 

To the Privileged Youth of Columbia University - more of an intemperate hissy-fit than a poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“Anglo-Saxon Students Would Not Like to Be Taught by a Jew”

 

Cited in

Stanley Kunitz Lyrics, Songs, and Albums | Genius

 

To the Privileged Youth of Columbia University:

 

As a child of situational poverty

I am so grateful for all my Jewish teachers

 

Including

 

Moses

Joshua

Jeremiah

Samuel

David

Solomon

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph

Saint Peter and the others in The Twelve

Saint Paul

Elie Weisel

 

Chaim Potok

Herman Wouk

Leon Uris

Franz Kafka

Leonard Cohen

Anne Frank

Bernard Malamud

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Philip Roth

Osip Mandelstam

 

Saul Bellow

Isaac Asimov

Woody Allen

Edna Ferber

Yip Harburg

George Cukor

Oscar Hammerstein

Alan Lerner

Joseph Brodsky

Rob Morrow

 

Carl Reiner

Rod Serling

Franz Werfel

Alan Arkin

Claire Bloom

Leonard Nimoy

Chaim Topol

Ed Asner

Mel Brooks

Peter Falk

Werner Klemperer

 

Jack Klugman

Walter Matthau

Tony Randall

Mel Torme

John Banner

Kirk Douglas

Lorne Greene

Eli Wallach

Sam Wanamaker

Morey Amsterdam

 

Leo Genn

Otto Preminger

Jack Benny

Leslie Howard

Ernst Lubitsch

Cecil B. DeMille

Mortimer Adler

Allen Bloom

Harold Bloom

Irving Berlin

 

Boris Pasternak

Emil Ludwig

Eric Wolfgang Korngold

Elmer Bernstein

Max Steiner

George Gershwin

Dimitri Tiomkin

Samuel Fuller

Alexander Korda

Zoltan Korda

 

Emeric Pressburger

Erich von Stroheim

Billy Wilder

William Wyler

Fred Zinnemann

J. J. Abrams

Peter Bogdanovich

Michael Curtiz

Stanley Donen

Stanley Kramer

 

Howard Caine

Leon Askin

Robert Clary

Dinah Shore

Stephen Sondheim

Volodymyr Zelinsky

Simon Schama

Louise Gluck

Siegfried Sassoon

Isaac Rosenberg

 

Vasily Grossman

Stanley Kubrick

Viktor Frankl

Jonah

Steven Spielberg

Leonard Bernstein

 

 

 

And more, so many more, a cloud of witnesses

Whose names are written in gold on a scroll in Heaven

 

But somehow, in this world of beauty and truth

And humanity’s aspirations to the good

All you have found are bullhorns, trash fires, chants

Clinched fists, obscenities, lies, and shrieking hate

Humility Through the Looking Glass - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Humility Through the Looking Glass

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 22

 

My glass surprises me; it tells the truth

“Who is that old man?” I ask myself

And it rebukes me for that foolish question

I must admit to the glass that I am old

 

But when I turn and look outside myself

And greet the happy sun and breathe the dawn

Of a day rich with possibilities

And think of you – then I am young again

 

I tell my glass it is a silly glass

And it tells me I am a silly ass

Marcus Aurelius Down at the Auto Repair - poem

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Marcus Aurelius Down at the Auto Repair

 

Marcus Aurelius down at the auto repair –

Now there’s an image, him being an emperor and all

One of those philosophers who think about stuff

Who ask questions and read and write and stuff

 

If a man complains about the cost of new tires:

          Meditations V.9 – “Be not unhappy, or discouraged…”

And

          II.4 – “Remember how long you have been putting off these things…”

 

If a warranty has expired:

          VI.53 – “Accustom yourself to listen carefully…”

And

          VII.24 – “A scowling look is quite unnatural.”

 

If the engine is blown:

          X.33 – “Now it is not given to a cylinder to move everywhere…”

And

          VII.54 – “…it is in your power to accept…your present condition…”

 

 

And with that, Marcus steps outside for a cigarette.

 

 

(Many quotations attributed to Marcus Aurelius are bogus; these have been verified.)

Kirbyville Automotive and a Roman Philosopher

 On his large, electrical sign at Kirbyville Automotive my friend Shannon Davis posted this quote from Marcus Aurelius:

“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive – to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”

One does not imagine that quotations from a Roman philosopher and emperor are commonly found on roadside advertising in East Texas.

Update: Apparently Marcus Aurelius did not say this at all.  This is just another misquote circling around on the InterGossip and believed by people like me who tend to trust maybe a little too much.

But I wish the man had said it anyway.

But Truly Write - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

But Truly Write

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 21

 

…poems are gatherings of words, in good order, in simple order, plain and appealing.

 

-Mary Oliver, A Poetry Handbook, p. 77

 

A line of contemporary prosetry

Is a catalogue of florid structures and worn-out cliches

Pancaked with adverbs and tiresome metaphors

Flung down in a confusion of unconnected gasps

 

If you have something to say, then say it

Then tidy up the lines – like washing your face

With soap and water and a cotton towel

And then admire the sunlit, fresh-air truth

 

Craft your lines of transcendent poetry

As clean sharp-edg’ed truth in well-scrubbed words