When to the Sessions of Sweet, Noisy Thought - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

When to the Sessions of Sweet, Noisy Thought

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 30

 

I don’t need to summon up remembrances

They simply wander in uninvited

In death just as they did in life, good friends

To sit together with our jokes, our drinks, our pipes

 

We still argue with each other, our minds

So familiar after all those happy years

Thesis, antithesis, and Dunhill tobacco

Ice cubes rattling in the soft summer dusk

 

Lewis and Tolkien show up late, stern Milton too

Remembrances? Not really – we are forever here

 

 

In Moscow, 1937, during the annual Soviet writers’ congress—a time of severe purges—Pasternak took a courageous stand. Amidst the dull, regime-prescribed speeches praising Leninist-Stalinism, he did something extraordinary. He recited Sonnet 30 by William Shakespeare:

 

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear times’ waste.”

 

The impact was profound. All two thousand writers in the hall rose to their feet, joining Pasternak in this act of defiance. The number “30” became a symbol of resistance, a testament to the enduring power of poetry and memory.

 

Introducing a Sunday Series from Douglas Murray: Things Worth Remembering | The Free Press (thefp.com)

 

Those Who Straddle the Temple Walls - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Those Who Straddle the Temple Walls

 

“Choose you this day whom you will serve”

 

-Joshua 24:15

 

For those who are desperate to be accepted as cool –

 

You cannot straddle the walls of the holy Temple

You cannot straddle the barbed wire of Auschwitz

You cannot straddle the banks of the Red Sea

You cannot choose two sides and call them one

 

Since the Hitler time there have not been two sides

 

You cannot wear both the tallit and the snakeskin

You cannot break bread with your grinning executioners

You cannot dance to circled drums and bullhorn chants

You cannot forswear your family murdered in the gas chambers

 

Since the burning time there have not been two sides

 

He who chooses the fashionable, the clever, the cool

Chooses to be a kapo, a funktionshaftling

His people will despise him, so too his masters

                   (Who in the end will kill him in his shame)

And his memory will be a curse, not a blessing

 

But you –

 

Choose bravely so that your name will be written in The Book

And written in the hearts of your proud descendants

 

When Fortune and Men’s Eyes are in Disgrace - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

When Fortune and Men’s Eyes are in Disgrace

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 29

 

A good thing with being disgraced in men’s eyes

Is that that mostly they don’t notice you at all

As a nobody you are but a shadow at best

Or an accessory in their empty scenes

 

If they don’t notice you, then you are not disgraced

And you have better things to do anyway:

Children to raise, songs to sing, books to write

Each day’s honest labor at your honest craft

 

The resolution is

 

That some men might be disgraced in your eyes

That is, if you choose to notice them at all

And Why is There a Police Car in Your Driveway? - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

And Why is There a Police Car in Your Driveway?

 

Cf. Shakespeare, Sonnet 28

 

The days are a mess and so are the nights

Each day is burdened with labors unrelenting

Toils industrial and toils emotional

Everyone seems to want a bite of you

 

At night the stresses follow you to bed:

The boss’s write-ups seem to poison the pillows

The unpaid bills, the clapped-out car, the fears

The children’s report cards, the broken washer

 

You give life your all – you work, you struggle, you strive -

And why is there a cop car in your drive?

These Here So-Called Schools These Days - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

These Here So-Called Schools These Days

  

“Lead, Follow, or Get the H*** Out of the Way” 

-a sign on the bulkhead in recruit training

  

Those coffee-shop cynics drowning in dejection:

Some of them wallow in existential abjection

And some meet every hope with an objection

Or with a sneering, irrelevant deflection

 

          But I did something other than b**** and moan

 

I voted in my local school board election

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