Thursday, January 16, 2025

Binding Each Word with a Prayer - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Binding Each Word with an Incantation, a Charm, a Spell

 

You. Not a generalized out-there “you” but – YOU

 

Gentle Writer

 

A mysterious thought is dream’ed unto you

Or a conclusion sails from your observant mind

 

You take a pen of goose-quill carefully carved

You dip it into a horn or pottle of ink

Not a metaphorical inkhorn of floridity

But the horn of a beast, hollowed out

Stoppered with a fitted wooden plug

And charged with ink of a curious blue

Of minerals or dyes or the juice of berries boiled

And worked with pagan spells or Christian prayers

 

You take an expensive page of animal-skin

Worked out with scrapings and scrubbings and acids

Or perhaps imported sheets of Egyptian papyrus

(Against which some of the younger brethren sneer)

 

Remember the annual budget! Be careful, now!

Paper doesn’t grow on trees, you know!

(Well, you could argue about the papyrus)

 

You set the light just right, the sun or a lamp

The Altar is where candles glow in honor of Our Lord

(And then there’s the budget; candles are expensive)

So you must work with the sun or a tallow lamp

At a writing slope angled as the amarius says

 

You think a thought

You lift your pen

With a prayer upon it

You guide it down

You write a word

 

A word

 

Each word is magic

 

 

 

 

 

 

What did you write?

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

Front Toward Enemy - very short free verse poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Front Toward Enemy

 

If

In what we may laughingly call real life

You can read those three words

You’re in the wrong place

‘Bye-‘bye

The Cold Has Gotten Old - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Cold Has Gotten Old

 

 

  For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snow-storms...

 

-Thoreau, Walden

 

 

The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees

And little lights in all their vestmental tints

No longer counterpoint the dark northern breeze

No visions of spring, no dreamings, no hints

 

The happy lawns of summer are mud and frost

The path to the cowshed is a rattle of sleet

The trail to the fishing hole was yesterday lost

And our boots are too thin for our freezing feet

 

But after our chores boiling hot coffee, please -

The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees!

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Nothing You Write is Confidential - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Your Poem’s Background Check

 

And above all, who is in power in that part of the country,

or, rather, who will be by the time we get there?

 

-Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

We don’t suffer a Soviet Writers’ Union

Except that we do – and what are you up to?

Have you written an ordinary adjective

That will be forbidden in a future place?

          You sound suspiciously colonialist

 

Last year DEI was mandatory

This year it will be a forbidden scheme

What guidelines for little magazines

Will be cleansed in the New Order to come?

          Harriet Monroe is a non-person now

 

Who will be in charge of your poetry and your life

Whenever you don’t get to wherever it was 

          that you were going?

Monday, January 13, 2025

Your Changes Have Been Made - poem

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Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

Your Changes Have Been Saved

 

 

Noticed the passive voice              the passive voice is to be noticed

 

You did not make changes             changes were not made by you

                                                       but changes were made

 

You did not save changes                 changes were not saved by you

                                                          but changes were saved

 


If you were relevant you might have been consulted

Imagine There's No "Imagine" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Imagine There’s No “Imagine”

“Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

-G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man


Imagine a world without anthems that whine

It’s difficult if we try; the ‘seventies cry

Rockabilly tunes in the communion line

And fling fluorescents from a dropped-ceiling sky

 

The ‘seventies tell the Bible what to say

And dangling speakers program us with a primitive beat

Manifestos proclaim the ideology of the day

The Gospel is reduced to an electronic tweet

 

But, peace! 

 

The tie-dyed ‘seventies still croak and wail

But it is the Eternal that will prevail

 

12 January 2025

Stand-To for Night Patrol - short poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Stand-To for Night Patrol

 

 

The Americans were said to believe that the Communists are on the defensive…

 

-New York Times, 11 January 1970

 

I keep seeing a boat’s black silhouette

Upon the red water, against the red sky

And the black-death tree-line along the shore

A dark, decaying scene, and I don’t know why

There is More Than One Book - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

There is More Than One Book

 

A civilization writes and reads its books

As poetry, pictures, prose, and glorious song

Of war and work and love and peaceful fields

Scholarship and courage and a people’s arts

 

But when unhappy men with an unhappy god

Maintain that their one book is all we’ll need

In submission to build an empire of death

The threat is clear: their god doesn’t want us

 

Reading and writing are civilization

From the very beginning of Creation

52 Hebrew Words - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

52 Hebrew Words

 

Max gave me a book: 52 Hebrew Words

For Christmas

Appreciate the irony that isn’t there –

If Judaism isn’t real, then neither are we

 

Words in Hebrew seem to be topped as flames

As Light - the light as truth, the light for truth

As flame for sacrifice, as flame for peace

As Torah unrolled, all Creation unrolled

 

Everything begins with a word, the Word

Today we will begin with Shema – Hear

 

With gratitude

 

 

52 Hebrew Words. Dave Adamson. Christian Art Gifts: Bloomington

Friday, January 10, 2025

Reading the Room - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Reading the Room

 

I don’t know to read a room, but look –

I’m still pretty good at reading a book

A Colonial project - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a victim of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a perpetrator of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a victim of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Or is it

 

THE Colonial Project

 

And whose?

 

I think I’ll make a pot of tea

 

If that’s not too colonial for anyone

 

And would you like a cup?

 

Thursday, January 9, 2025

May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland

 

Man arrested entering the Capitol with a machete and three knives

 

-U. K. Daily Mail

 

 

No weapons in the Capitol; it’s a rule

The adults who work there must be safely bubbled

But when some pimply oaf brings a gun to school

No one in D.C. seems especially troubled

I am a Ptolemaic - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

I am a Ptolemaic

 

 

There was a star danced, and under that I was born

 

-Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, II.i.349

 

 

This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got

Our Narnia, our Middle-Earth; it’s green

It’s green and blue and round, an almost-sphere

Fitted with all the ancient conveniences

 

Let the stars encircle us as a crown

And who will dare to say it is not so?

For we are commanded to grow this garden

By the light of the sun, and of faith and love

 

As Shakespeare might have said, this blessed plot -

This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got

"LA Fires Bring Art to a Halt" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

“LA Fires Bring Art to a Halt”

 

Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art and Its Discontents

 

No.

 

A fire brings nothing to a halt

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives -

 

A poet abandoning her car to flee for her life

Holds to her heart her notebooks in grocery-store bag

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A trumpeter manages to save the mouthpiece at least

While carrying his child out to an ambulance

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A sculptor’s eyes record a wall of windows

To be re-molded as life-filled windows of dreams

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

Firefighters wrestling a hose through smoke and heat

Are a choreograph of life against flaming death

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

An artist whose studio is now but smoke

Will stir ashes and water, and paint again

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A little girl will write of her little dog

Her bestest pal whom she never saw again

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

In a shelter tonight an aging man

Will sing to himself the love songs of his youth

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

 

 

                                   then patch

 

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

 

-Mary Oliver, “Praying”

Wednesday, January 8, 2025

“Now, Therefore, Write for Yourselves This Song” - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

“Now, Therefore, Write for Yourselves This Song” 

 

 

-Deuteronomy 31:19 per Talmud at My Jewish Learning <community@mail.myjewishlearning.com>

 

 

“Nunc itaque scribite vobis canticum istud.”

 

-Douay-Rheims

 

 

What song will you write for the people of God?

Something from the Prophets or the Laws

A hymn for Mary, dancing in the spring

Or maybe praise for patient and protective Joseph

 

What song will you write for your own true love?

Gentle rhyming for the music of her gentle laugh

Iambics and meters her intellect to please

Birdsong sweet to limn her holiness

 

What song will you write for the world God made?

Matins for mist and mountain and flowered glade