Grace and a Wheelchair - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Grace and a Wheelchair

 

At the coffee shop

 

I found myself kneeling, as if in church

Crawling behind some empty tables in search

Of an electrical outlet for my new friend Grace

Whose mother wheeled her in for a space

 

And Grace needed electricity for her little screen

Where a red cow played in a pasture green

“Will this outlet do?” “Oh, it’s too far away”

So good folk formed a committee today:

 

“If we move this table back, and shift this chair…”

Family together – it’s right and fair

Thus Grace was enthroned, the queen of our hearts

Her subjects had all played their several parts

 

Grace has no filters, no volume control

But, oh! What a happy, blessed soul!

 

 

And I returned to my coffee as if everything had happened

It Looks Like You are Using an Ad Blocker - couplet

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

It Looks Like You are Using an Ad Blocker

 

V: It looks like you are using an ad blocker

R: Yes, yes, I am – how clever of you to notice!

Upon Being Invited to a Zoom Meeting about Japanese Poetry - Senryu

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

 

Upon Being Invited to a Zoom Meeting about Japanese Poetry

 

As Basho Did Not Say

 

Soft winds do not zoom

The sky silently shares dreams

But not on glass screens

The Bishop of Rome and an A. I. Tower of Babel - rhyming couplet

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

The Bishop of Rome and an A.I. Tower of Babel

 

Artificial intelligent is not where life is at -

So everybody smoke, smoke, smoke that ziggurat!

An Excerpt from Kubla Don - as Coleridge did not say

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

An Excerpt from Kubla Don

 

 

As Coleridge Did Not Say

 

 

On sacred land did Kubla Don

A tatty wrestling ring decree

Where bit-coins, his sacred lucre, ran

From taxes and seizures measureless to man

          Down to a soulless sea

So eighteen acres of historic ground

With guards and guns were barb-wired round

And there were gift shops bright with ringing tills,

Where blossomed many trinkets (not for free)

Crushing the last few bits of greenery…

 

Thank you for your attention to this matter

A Skull and a Missing Boundary Marker - poem for Memorial Day

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

A Skull and a Missing Boundary Marker

 

 

For Memorial Day

 

 

“We’re in Cambodia,” the boat captain whispered

Unlike Shelley’s Ozymandias

There were no trunkless legs of stone, no carvings

No border station, no marker, no words

 

The skipper cut the engines. We drifted. Heat

Silence beneath the encoffining trees

Perhaps the ghosts were telling us to go away

Remember them maybe, but go away

 

Someone handed me an aged skull he had found

          Vietnamese?

          French?

          Japanese?

          Cambodian?

Too old to be an American

 

All had passed, and we were passing too

No boundary marker, only a skull

 

Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual Light shine upon them. May they rest in peace.

de Chardin's Omega Point - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

de Chardin’s Omega Point

 

 

If I knew where I was sailing from,

I could calculate where I was sailing to.

 

-Number Six, The Prisoner: The Chimes of Big Ben

 

 

The Philosopher suggests there is an Omega Point

Where the physics and mysteries of Creation converge

Where the End is the Beginning without an end

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful unified

 

Then there must have been, or is, or will be

An Alpha base of Creation and Incarnation

Snakes and sinners writhing beneath the Tree

The Seder as the Last Supper, or the First

 

The Philosopher suggests there is an Omega Point -

But I don’t seem to have a map

Eating Biblically 4 - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Eating Biblically 4

 

Eat kosher meats, legumes, and barley,

But not exoskeletals; they’re so gnarly!

Eating Biblically 3 - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Eating Biblically 3

 

Let’s give landeskirchenfuher Hegseth a pass

After all

He eats with the jawbone of an ass

Eating Biblically 2 - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Eating Biblically 2

 

 

In Exodus there’s not a verb

About eating a Hebrew named Bitter Herb

Eating Biblically - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Eating Biblically

 

I’ve never felt that I was liable

To dine upon on a tasty bible

Where Words Matter More than Noise - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Where Words Matter More than Noise

 

As a wise friend says

 

“The unacknowledged legislators of the world” ¹

Do not assemble in chambers of marble and oak

With speakers’ maces, in ermine-collared robes

Their speeches taken down by The Guardian and The Times

 

But rather at corner tables at Kosher Sam’s ²

Café Zanzibar ³, The Stray Dog Café ⁴

With disposable pens, and in jeans and tees

Their speeches interrupted by each other

 

Ideas later sharpened into verse

And published in LogoSophia and Eliot’s HP ⁵

 

 

¹ Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry”

² San Diego

³ Nacogdoches (and can you spell “Nacogdoches?”)

⁴ St. Petersburg

⁵ LogoSophia and Hello, Poetry

Hello, You - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Hello, You

 

Hello, You

 

You, who have never written an idle line,

Give a second sunrise to each merry morning

Or if a morning is not permitted, a dusk

An hour of your gentle peace to read

 

Hello, You

 

You, who chant for us your litany of hope

We who are blessed in your thoughts and words

In how you shape chaos into hymns of love

And sing your stories to the universe

 

Hello, You

 

You, who have never written an idle line

Pray for all of us, please, at your Heliconian shrine

Landing at Port aux Basques - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Landing at Port aux Basques

 

 

“He was faithful and daft to me”

 

-as Marc Antony did not say

 

 

We were approaching Newfoundland aboard the old Caribou

I climbed up on deck in the icy, clear dawn

A mysterious woman in a Burberry coat

Smoked cigarettes in the lee of a ventilator

 (and ignored me)

 

In the cold I surveyed the brown and white coast

And reported back to Dan that there was snow ashore

“You’re daft,” he replied, “those are just little houses.”

But there was snow indeed on Port aux Basques

 

We rattled Dan’s CRV up Highway 1

          (driving around a dead moose in the road)

On daft adventures all the way to Saint John’s

 

Dan is the only one who has ever called me daft; indeed, except in the movies I have never heard anyone else use the term.

The Flag and the Fourth Amendment flown at Half-Mast Down at the Post Office - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

The Flag and the Fourth Amendment flown at Half-Mast

Down at the Post Office

 

 

“VEHICLES AND THEIR CONTENTS ARE SUBJECT TO INSPECTION WHEN ENTERING, LEAVING, OR WHILE PARKED WITHIN THIS RESTRICTED AREA. ENTERING INTO THIS AREA CONSTITUTES CONSENT TO THE INSPECTION. (39 C. F. R. PART 232.1(b)(2)”

 

-a new sign screwed to the wall at my rural post office

 

 

The flag was flown at half-mast again today

As it often is for weeks at a time, it seems

A moment in history? A loss? A death?

Maybe another Texas senator or bird dog? ¹

 

The flag was flown at half-mast again today

Some guy down the street flew it upside down

Protesting or surrendering or not paying attention

To the latest crisis in our decaying republic

 

The flag was flown at half-mast again today -

I wonder if now it will always be that way

 

 

¹ A reference to a line in True Grit