Prayer for Saint John Paul II with a Bar Code - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Prayer for Saint John Paul II with a Bar Code

A homily scrunched onto a prayer card
A catalogue of petitions and prayers
With barely enough room for the bar code
Fitted to the bottom mechanically

Condense the happiness, remembering
A merry moment not so long ago
The young chanting
“John Paul II, we love you!”

Over and over in the happy night
And that joyful man at the window there
Replying to them
“John Paul II – he loves you!”


Erase the card’s long lines of words, and then
Write only this:

V: “John Paul II, we love you!”
R: “John Paul II – he loves you!”

Blood Moon - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Blood Moon

The end of the world is upon us again
Twice in one month our planet has been cursed
Or doomed or something; it’s all about sin
And cobbled superstitions badly versed

Oh, no -

For we are given a September night
Incensed with last week’s rolled-up summer grass
And blessed with choirs of autumn stars for light
A silver sanctuary lamp, and prayers to pass

In procession solemn this Saint Michael’s Eve
And joyful to us who trust and believe

The Long Retreat - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Long Retreat

Everything seems to be sad twilight now
Our golden dusk has dimmed, and slipped away
Built of ego and credit card receipts
The barricades were easily overrun

Desperately in time, desperately out of date
The battle hymns of yesterday ring out
Through the corridors of the old folks’ home
As leaden oldies groovin’ to the past

Let us stand down and vigil the Dawn, for
Everything seems to be sad twilight now

Song of the Wild Sheep - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Song of the Wild Sheep

Does a sheep ever long to be a free spirit?
While waiting in a pen for shearing time
And flocked with other sheep between the rows
Of fences channeling them here and there?

Does it imagine itself a timbersheep
Stalking poor winter grass through snowy woods
Or a furry hippie groovin’ at Sheepstock
Or yet a philosopher named Ovis?

If a sheep ever mahhhhhs a manifesto
It will be set to mewesic by Mahhhhhler!

Cane, Shillelagh, or Pilgrim’s Staff?

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Cane, Shillelagh, or Pilgrim’s Staff?

A walking stick does not walk at all; it is carried by fashionable gentlemen who employ it both for adornment and for balance.

An acquaintance who shall rename nameless…don’t tell them your name, Pike! Oops – too late. Anyway, my buddy Pike must work with some uncooperative knee joints just now – knee joints are like that – but resists using his walking stick. My buddy Pike is like that.

Thus, I ask the reading public to help persuade Pike to take his walking stick with him on his adventures. Here is a beginning:

With the addition of a straw boater Pike could work on his Maurice Chevalier routine: “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise…”

For football games Pike could bring out his weekend sports model, a walking stick with a portrait of Elvis carved into the handle.

All the cool kids have walking sticks this year.

An aluminum walking stick is a serious babe magnet.

Well, okay, a quadrupedal aluminum thingie is not cool, but for amusement Pike could name each of the four feet: Huey, Dewey, Louie, and Donald Trump, perhaps, or maybe Larry, Moe, Curly Joe, and Trevor.

Some walking sticks have a little compass in the handle. What could be more important than knowing where north is while roaming free in the vegetable aisle at the grocery store?

If Pike carries a walking stick and moans in pain occasionally, people won’t expect him to help move furniture.

A walking stick makes any elegant boulevardier appear even more elegant.

Pike could carry one of those clever walking sticks with a little flask of brandy concealed in the handle.

“Open Channel D.” Pike’s walking stick could also be a secret radio for transmitting T.H.R.U.S.H secrets to Mr. Waverly at U.N.C.L.E.

A walking stick can be used to measure the depth of street puddles and the Atlantic Ocean.

A swordstick would be handy for dealing with Commie assassins on darkened Berlin streets. It would also amuse TSA agents at airports.

A walking stick is good for beating snakes to death, especially the endangered species.

Why a walking stick? Because a walking pine cone just won’t do.

Most of all, I think my friend Pike should use his walking stick because without it he might fall and hurt himself. And that would make me very sad.

Pike would be sad too.

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On the Shortage of Farmhands - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com


On the Shortage of Farmhands

Or

Got Gratitude?

No televised awards for milking cows
No presidential medals of milkdom
No red carpets or memorial plaques
No offices, carpets, or retirement plans

The poets are silent on those who milk
Those pretty girls in cool convertibles
Are never known to swoon over good farmhands
And no one sings “She thinks my Jersey’s sexy!”

No takers? No need to wonder why and how
Since no one honors the man who milks a cow

Autumn Equinox with Heat and Dust - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Autumn Equinox with Heat and Dust

Perhaps old Janus is an autumn god
His door is open to the summer too
Open both ways at this the equinox
Upon tired heat and fall’s pale promises

Sunsets are earlier, and now the dusk
Is noisy with the mowers of late-summer
Still making hay while tractor headlights shine
Upon sad, dust-blown fields for one last turn

This is Saint Matthew’s Day, and summer still
Hangs heavily, like poor Macbeth’s late summons

An Offset Wing - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

An Offset Wing

A pine nut rotors down, suspended from
Its only wing for this its only flight
Dreamed long ago, and sung into this autumn
To free-fall-spin on warm September’s wind

This aviator of the mono-wing
Knows nothing of machined efficiency
Or scheduled maintenance according to
Electric rhythms in a plastic box

Its flight is brief, but changes everything:
A pine nut rotors down, and moves the world


Variant:

An Offset Wing

A pine nut rotors down, suspended from
Its only wing for this its only flight
Dreamed long ago, and sung into this autumn
To free-fall-spin on warm September’s wind

This aviator on a mono-wing
Knows nothing of machine efficiency
Or scheduled maintenance for turn-around
Its brevity is for eternity

The flight is brief, but changes everything:
A pine nut rotors down, and moves the world

Notification of Death - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Notification of Death

A sheet of paper is a forest leaf
Two sides of life reflected in the sun:
On one side is written the joy of youth
And on the other side an elegy

A single leaf is but ephemera
When one side disappears into the mist
So does the other one – or maybe not:
We are told both sides are corrected and kept

Fair-copied cleanly by a steady Hand
And folded then into the Book of Bliss

The Joint Task Force Combat Commando Pillow Brigade of Fluffy Death

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Joint Task Force Combat Commando Pillow Brigade of Fluffy Death

During the American Revolution, West Point, nee’ Fort Clinton, nee’ Fort Arnold, was fortified in order to keep the British Navy from controlling the Hudson River. The position was so important that the British paid General Arnold a great deal of money and a generalship in the British Army to betray the soldiers in his command. The plot failed but General Arnold got his British general’s uniform and maybe a nice pillow.

The matter of the Great West Point Pillow Fight of 2015 seems to have gone to sleep in the past few weeks. The thoughtful reader will remember that West Point ends its summer training with a pillow fight, just like the Marines, the 300 Spartans, the Samurai, the SEALS, the S.A.S., and the Spetsnaz.

The West Point Ye Olde Army Pillow Fight is said to be a century-old tradition. Several West Pointers from the 1970s report never having heard of it. Maybe West Point is like other schools, inventing brand-new old-time traditions every week or so.

One does not easily imagine Meade, Sherman, Lee, Patton, Pershing, Eisenhower, Abrams, Clark, Merrill, Ridgeway, and Haig pillow-fighting. Or their commandant ordering them to do so.

This year some of the lads decided that placing hard objects such as their helmets into the pillow cases would add to the merriment. Emergency room admissions followed. Nothing says Army Strong like breaking a fellow soldier’s arm or skull through a Benedict Arnold-ish dirty trick. In future wars these young officers will certainly know how much they can trust each other.

Since this is how future officers of the U.S. Army go all frat boy on each other, will they respect the service and dignity of the young enlisted men and women under their command?

The Russian army and air force are now active in Syria, and the Chinese navy is poking about in the ocean off Alaska. Russian bombers play double-dog-dare along the air spaces of free countries in Europe. In response, West Point is training the future leaders of the American army through Cub Scout hijinks.

Perhaps that’s in Sun Tzu’s The Art of Pillow.

“This is my pillow. There are many like it. But this one is mine.”

No doubt our young soldiers posted to Whose-Stupid-Idea-Was-This-Istan make their way into camp after exhausting patrols and small-unit action in the dust and heat and then amuse themselves with a jolly pillow fight.

Just like their superior officers.

The superintendent of West Point, a modern, sensitive sort of general who refers to soldiers as teammates, promised a full investigation, followed by short-sheeting the perpetrators.

Jokes aside, the New York Times reports that thirty cadets were injured in the pillow fight, with twenty-four of them suffering from concussion. In a pillow fight.

A pillow fight.

Thirty casualties.

In a pillow fight.

What would the odious Benedict Arnold think of that?

-30-

Room at the Inn

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Room at the Inn

If Jesus had been born in Newfoundland, the folks there would have found room for the Holy Family.

Many Americans fly over Newfoundland on their way to and from Europe, but too few visit that beautiful island. Fourteen years ago, when all flights to and from the USA were forbidden, a great many people of all nations found themselves taking an unexpected time-out there.

This piece of 9/11 history comes from Newfoundland via a friend of a friend there. Heather McKinnon, the operations manager of the Delta Hotel and Conference Center in St. John’s, relates this remembrance of 9.11.2001 and the days following:


I will never forget this day for the rest of my days. It was a Tuesday, on Sept 11, 2001. We became aware at the Delta that we would start accepting the passengers whose flights were landing in quick succession at YYT [St. John’s]. The first group of guests who arrived were flight crews from two United Airlines flights who had just lost many of their colleagues. They were shell shocked. Then the passengers started arriving - hundreds more than we could handle comfortably. And they kept coming. They slept on the floor in the ballrooms and meeting rooms, on couches in the lobby, anywhere they could find a space. This went on until the following Sunday. And my team here at the Delta displayed a level of humanity I won't soon forget. They swung into action. Worked an 8 hour shift and then volunteered to stay behind as unpaid volunteers for another 8-10 hours - served food, read stories to the children, organized games, took passengers to their homes for showers, did pharmacy runs. It went on and on. Corporate partners like Margot Bruce-O'Connell at ExxonMobil reached out to help us manage the masses. George Street United Church ministers conducted an ecumenical service in our lobby and everyone gathered together. Air Canada and United Airlines stranded flight crew showed up in their uniforms as a sign of respect to the fallen air crew of the US flight crew. It was heart breaking.

We had to ask all the ballroom sleeping bag guests to pack up their belongings on the Saturday before they left so a wedding could go ahead. Once the dinner was over, the bride threw open the doors to the ballroom and invited the passengers to the dance. For the first dance, they all joined hands in a massive circle around the wedding couple as they took their first dance. These passengers arrived as strangers. On Sunday, they left as grateful friends. On this day, every year since, I still receive messages from some of the guests from that week. They say the same thing. They will never forget. I have kept every one of those messages. What a week that was.

Amen.

An excellent book related to the thousands of travelers grateful to have been given sanctuary by the generous citizens of Newfoundland is Jim DeFede’s The Day the World Came to Town, New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

-30-

Enemies Foreign and Domestic - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Enemies Foreign and Domestic

Some battles are fought in dripping woods
And others along rivers lost in mist
Still others are fought in book and pen and thought
And in unhappy dreams, still lost in mist

About Those Purple Socks - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

About Those Purple Socks

Graham Greene’s Monsignor Quixote

The world had no more use for any of them:
An old Communist, an old priest, an old car
All of them well into their horsemeat days
And so they fled, and crashed into the truth

On a chivalric quest for purple socks
Wandering on the road to Golgotha
Their Stations of the Cross a cinema,
A pair of Guardia, a brothel, wine

And so they fled, and fell into the truth
There at the foot of the Altar of God

The History Side of Wrong - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aolcom

The History Side of Wrong

How very joyful then to be condemned
For serving on the wrong side of history
Stubbornly refusing the Kronos-trap
And laughing at a clock that isn’t there

Poor centuries are but long lists of lies
Death’s dated data-base of next best things
That weren’t, as pointless as a game of Pong
Played out by polyester Arians

For the tired thoughtcrime of not groovin’ in time:
How very joyful now to be condemned!

A Salvage Sunday Morning - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Salvage Sunday Morning

Pearly morning mist over our little harbour
The water sloshing a few feet away
A censer swinging, wafting goodly odours:
Sweet water, air, and earth, consubstantial
With coffee in a mug from Canadian Tire
A morning offering in gratitude
From this small porch, for all of Creation
For the quiet before Bert starts cussing his boat
(Because the engine is balky again) -
For here where we have found a Heaven indeed

Room at the Inn

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Room at the Inn

If Jesus had been born in Newfoundland, the folks there would have found room for the Holy Family.

Many Americans fly over Newfoundland on their way to and from Europe, but too few visit that beautiful island. Fourteen years ago, when all flights to and from the USA were forbidden, a great many people of all nations found themselves taking an unexpected time-out there.

This piece of 9/11 history comes from Newfoundland via a friend of a friend there. Heather McKinnon, the operations manager of the Delta Hotel and Conference Center in St. John’s, relates this remembrance of 9.11.2001 and the days following:


I will never forget this day for the rest of my days. It was a Tuesday, on Sept 11, 2001. We became aware at the Delta that we would start accepting the passengers whose flights were landing in quick succession at YYT [St. John’s]. The first group of guests who arrived were flight crews from two United Airlines flights who had just lost many of their colleagues. They were shell shocked. Then the passengers started arriving - hundreds more than we could handle comfortably. And they kept coming. They slept on the floor in the ballrooms and meeting rooms, on couches in the lobby, anywhere they could find a space. This went on until the following Sunday. And my team here at the Delta displayed a level of humanity I won't soon forget. They swung into action. Worked an 8 hour shift and then volunteered to stay behind as unpaid volunteers for another 8-10 hours - served food, read stories to the children, organized games, took passengers to their homes for showers, did pharmacy runs. It went on and on. Corporate partners like Margot Bruce-O'Connell at ExxonMobil reached out to help us manage the masses. George Street United Church ministers conducted an ecumenical service in our lobby and everyone gathered together. Air Canada and United Airlines stranded flight crew showed up in their uniforms as a sign of respect to the fallen air crew of the US flight crew. It was heart breaking.

We had to ask all the ballroom sleeping bag guests to pack up their belongings on the Saturday before they left so a wedding could go ahead. Once the dinner was over, the bride threw open the doors to the ballroom and invited the passengers to the dance. For the first dance, they all joined hands in a massive circle around the wedding couple as they took their first dance. These passengers arrived as strangers. On Sunday, they left as grateful friends. On this day, every year since, I still receive messages from some of the guests from that week. They say the same thing. They will never forget. I have kept every one of those messages. What a week that was.

Amen.

An excellent book related to the thousands of travelers grateful to have been given sanctuary by the generous citizens of Newfoundland is Jim DeFede’s The Day the World Came to Town, New York: Harper Collins, 2002.

-30-

Perhaps Today - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Perhaps Today…

The sun appears each dawn, predictably
In its accustomed cosmic liturgy
Arising from the baptism of the night
The sins of yesterday now washed away

It smiles upon all earthbound penitents
And sings a morning hymn of sacraments
For now a theme, a dream, to dance as light
Thin filaments of air, soft-sighing there

Are teasingly presented, and then – withdrawn:
Another night of feverish, ragged sleep

Untamed Poem - Poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Untamed Poem

A writer in an online 'zeen issues
An edict that must not be disobeyed:
By order poetry will be untamed
Untamed and free! (to specifications)

Now unmuzzle the trammeled trimeter
Let trope and trochee gallop wild and free
Release pentameters to pentabout
And dactyls to anaphora their dreams

O wild little poem, telling truth through metaphor -
You will be neutered by the editor

Whatever Happened to Gilligan's Castaways?

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Whatever Happened to Gilligan’s Castaways?

After a busy day we are all tempted to take a well-deserved break from work and family chores in order to flop into a comfortable chair and vegetate in front of jolly post-war Italian cinema, the merry visions of Fritz Lang’s silent German films (silent, and somehow still loudly German), or the fluffy Soviet films of Sergei Bondarchuk, Sergei Eisenstein, and Grigory Chukhray.

Who hasn’t shed tears of joy and laughter as the cackling, sneering, moustache-twirling Czarist cavalry run down innocent, granola-earing, flower-sniffing workers and peasants through the thoughtful character development and in the subtle artistry for which Soviet films are famous?

We have to remind herself that for the sake of intellectual and ethical development we should occasionally challenge ourselves to consider more demanding works of the visual arts: Gilligan’s Island comes to mind.

The exposition is this - in the autumn of 1964 the tour boat Minnow is disabled by a storm and beached on an unknown island. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Skipper is a pirate, but now he has reformed and doesn’t murder people. Although the Skipper is an experienced seaman, hiring bumbling Gilligan as his ship’s crew does indicate a tendency to self-destruction. Also aboard, and then beached, are a rascally Republican millionaire and his wife, a movie star, a professor, and a farm girl.

For three years of half-hour programs and then a series of television movies and cartoon remakes the castaways enjoyed adventures among themselves and with hundreds of visitors – including Soviet cosmonauts and the Harlem Globetrotters – on that supposedly unknown island.

The irony of Gilligan’s Island is that while the castaways want to leave the beach and the palm trees, the rest of us think that a month or so of sloshing around in the lagoon and drinking refreshing beverages from a coconut shell would be great therapy. And let the people say “existential.”

And what happened to the castaways?

After returning to the USA Gilligan became the lead technology guru for the State Department.

The Skipper, as a middle-aged white male, was declared redundant. He is said to spend his days on the beach in Florida bumming spare change from tourists and singing “Margaritaville” in bars.

Thurston Howell IV is currently the director of the Donald Trump campaign. Mr. Howell’s wife, Lovey, left him for Brad Pitt. The bitter custody battle over her pink poodles and Mr. Howell’s famous suitcase full of cash continues to this day.

Glamorous Ginger, now over thirty, finds work only as erratic mothers in guest spots in unimaginative, heavily laugh-tracked sitcoms.

The Professor was vetted by his university for ideological correctness, sensitivity, and multi-culti, and is permitted to continue teaching and research as long as he understands that physics, chemistry, and the maths are not objective realities, and can be changed often since they are always subject to the collective needs and cultural visions of The People.

Mary Ann developed a television cooker show called The Ruthlessly Chipper Cupcake which was a staple of daytime programming for years until she was convicted for poisoning three husbands, four boyfriends, and an unknown number of unhappy staffers. Her case was not helped when she baked the judge and prosecutor a batch of happy-face cupcakes sodden with a rare poison she discovered while on the island.

Does anyone imagine that Gilligan’s Island, with its innocent plots and gags and physical comedy, would be accepted for prime-time programming now?

The little ship Minnow is said to have been named as a dig at Newton Minnow, the chairman of the FCC who famously dismissed television as “a vast wasteland.” If Gilligan’s Island is a wasteland, well, this poor old world certainly could use a little more waste.

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September at Last - Poem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

September at Last

A dawn under clouds – September at last
No one longs for August, or misses it
The heat and humidity linger still
But the mythology of the calendar

Has drawn the summer’s metaphorical fangs
And grownups now anticipate cold fronts
Like children who know that Christmas will come
Although the season seems to be taking

Its own sweet time in bringing home its gifts
Of chilly mornings, and geese winging south

The Apocalyptic Wasp Spray of Cosmic Doom

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Apocalyptic Wasp Spray of Cosmic Doom

As with rattlesnakes, fire ants, and presidential candidates, the purpose of wasps within the glory of Creation is a great mystery.

Big red Communist wasps, their wicked, batlike wings pulsating slowly to the degenerate rhythm of a pagan blood-song of pain, lurk in porch corners - or along any of Donald Trump or Scott Walker’s Berlin walls - and then attack with a sting as painful and bitter as a glare of disapproval from a poll watcher from the other party who sees you voting in The Wrong Primary.

As the old hippie song does not say: Wasps! Unh! What are they good for!? Absolutely nothin’!

And if the county agricultural extension agent tells you that wasps are a beneficent species because they blah, blah, blah, she’s probably a Fascist or something. So there. Tell me something. End of. And stuff. And other logical rebuttals.

Real Americans buy aerosols of toxic poisons for sending wasps to the Grendel-doom they’ve earned. If the environment must be destroyed in order that wasps die, that’s a fair and reasonable exchange.

Usually the sprays work, but sometimes the wasps fly insolently away, unimpressed with better dying through chemistry.

What this world needs is a really good wasp spray. The ideal wasp spray would not kill wasps instantly, though. Oh, no. The perfect bug bomb would send each wasp spinning down like The Red Baron in flames, thudding to the ground still alive but dying in such gruesome (or is that grueful?) pain that the progressive Renaissance practice of hanging, drawing, and quartering would seem like a walk in the mall.

The American consumer wants that wasp to feel the soul-destroying existential despair of a freshman football player at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville when he (or “zhe”) is told that the name of his (or “zher”) team has been changed from The Tennessee Volunteers to The Incredible Edible Eloi.

The dying wasp must wallow in the same agony as a traveler doomed to wander throughout eternity the wretched-hive-of-scum-and-villainy hallways of Newark International Airport.

The dying wasp must be made to feel the ghostly chill that reduces even the bravest, strongest young manly-man into a quivering emotional puddle when he arrives at school on Monday morning and suddenly remembers that he is scheduled to take an algebra II exam at 0800.

The dying wasp must experience total bleakness of spirit as he realizes in his last moments that, just like a Republican in the summer of 2015, his life suddenly has no meaning after all. And that’s really hairy.

The dying wasp must sob in spasms of grief and sorrow, rather like a hungry child standing in line for her Michelle Obama lunch.

The dying wasp must be made to scream in horror like an ear-banging-hammer-metal-scum-rock DJ who finds that he is scheduled to work the three-day All Lovin’ Spoonful All The Time Festival.

Anyone who has ever applied cold compresses to a swollen, wasp-stung ear can only wonder why wasps were allowed to board the Ark and unicorns were not.

We need a meaner wasp spray.

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