Another Moonrise Picture from 1.30.2018 - photograph. Canon Eos Rebel

A Russian Series, 9: The Fifth Karamazov - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Fifth Karamazov

When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox 1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ

When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now

Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines

Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are

But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina 2
Those Russian messengers 3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor 4 hermitage


1 Russian Orthodox
2 The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3 The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4 Poor only by secular standards

Moonrise, East Texas, 1.30.18 - Photograph, Canon Rebel Eos

Kansas Arithmetic - Photo (Nikon J1, before it failed)

A Russian Series, 8: "Withdrawn from Salem Public Library" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Withdrawn from Salem Public Library”

 

Yevtushenko in a Used-Book Sale

“Salem Public Library, East Main Street,
Salem, VA 24153”
A happy book, thought-stained, and often-read:
An anthology of Russian poetry

Salem, Virginia must be a marvelous town
A library stocked with poetry, and stocked
With poetry readers who have turned again
And again to favorite pages here and there

Long-ago poets murdered by the Soviets
But finding love at last in Salem, Virginia












Re:

20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Gold
Selected and with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward, editors
New York: Doubleday. 1993

Abilene, Kansas - photograph (brilliantly engineered but poorly built Nikon J1)

A Russian Series, 7: And Every Strand of Barbed Wire is Excused - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

And Every Strand of Barbed Wire is Excused

Perhaps the sound is pleasant to the ear
The concept that free men and women can choose
Wisely wise leaders wisely to lead them
Backwards, crashing the gates of Eden lost

And building there a world of perfect peace
No matter how many millions must die for it
And every strand of barbed wire is excused:
“Oh, well, at least we got rid of the Czar.”

The firing squads, the cries of dying children -
Perhaps those sounds are pleasant to the ear

Canadian Soldier Mural, Eisenhower Museum - Photograph, Nikon J1 (before it packed it in; Nikon wouldn't honor the warranty)

A Russian Series, 6: Did the Russians Hide Nukes in Your Sock Drawer? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Did the Russians Hide Nukes

in Your Sock Drawer?

The western sky is blue; the east is red
But try to put it right out of your head
If you find a Russian under your bed
Concealing a nuke that will kill you dead

The Intergossip surely must be right
So hit the keyboard now, and share the fright
On Social-Medium-Range all through the night
And type it really fast before…that
LIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ding-dong, the east is red, the west is blue
And rumors drift about, flake news, untrue

Keys to an Enigma, Eisenhower Museum, Abilene, Kansas - Photograph (Nikon J1, which Nikon won't repair under warranty)

A Russian Series, 5: If the Russians Find Out That the Iced Tea was Bugged...

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

If the Russians Find Out

That the Iced Tea was Bugged…

If the Russians find out that the iced tea
Was bugged they may well conclude that Area 51
Has tested Tom Brady’s jersey which was stowed
In a bus station locker in Donetsk

With the claim check issued to Kellyanne Conway
And passed to a North Korean operative via
A secret drop in a hollow pumpkin
Behind a voting machine in Spokane

That was hacked by a rogue albino nun
Carrying secret numbers for Rand Paul

The Grammys Celebrate Workers - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Grammys Celebrate Workers

“A forklift carrying barricades held up a crowd of commuters…”

-Los Angeles Times

With frosted breath, hands gloved against the cold
A working man forklifts the barricades
Into the streets, that he may block himself
From musical celebrations of work

Inside the temporary Palace of Culture
Musicians are being told what to wear
What they are for, and what they are against
Their speeches scrolled on discreet telescreens

The workers barred from work shiver and wait
For artists great, who never pay the freight

Detail from President Eisenhower's Boyhood Home - photograph (Nikon J1 with crumbling innards)

A Russian Series, 4: The Death of a Good and Faithful Spider - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Death of a Good and Faithful Spider

In Tod Mixson’s ikon corner a good and faithful spider fulfilled its vocation in an arachnid-life well spent.

A good and faithful spider lived its life
In spinning and dusting and catching pests
In the ikon corner among the saints:
Kyril and Methodius, Seraphim

Tikhon the Wonderworker, Vladimir
Anna of Kashin, Nicholas the Czar
Zosima, Xenia of Saint Petersburg
And all the cloud of holy Slavic witness

Whose images were guarded worthily
By a little spider who served God well

Summer Thunderstorm - Photograph (Nikon J1 with the crumbling plastic innards)

A Russian Series, 3: The Battle of Kursk, 1943 - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Kursk

At a railway junction great powers meet
To blacken the earth with a generation
Of young musicians, mechanics, physicians
Electricians, farmers, painters, and poets

And a philosopher who loves to fish
Ground into blood and screams and scraps of flesh
By the future which some have seen, which works 1
For the dress-uniform closed loop of power

Beneath the Russian sky good young men die
And the tyrants who send them lie and deny




1 Lincoln Steffens

Little Bighorn, Last Stand Hill - Photograph, Nikon J1 (with the crumbling plastic insides)

A Russian Series: 2 - "Until the First Star"

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Until the First Star” –

Orthodox Christmas Eve

The first star won’t be seen this night. The clouds
Obscure this fallen world, and seem to hide
The pilgrim paths to Bethlehem from all
Who seek their Saviour in the colding night

But yet the first star will be seen in truth,
In all the faces around the happy table
Gathered from field and forest, east and west,
Breaking the Advent fast with Christmas joy

And with the liturgies Our Lord is born
Beneath the star that will forever shine

School Book Cover, Mixson Brothers, Kirbyville, Texas, 1965 - photograph

A Russion Series, 1: All Change at Zima Junction

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

All Change at Zima Junction

For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017

Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer

And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what are you doing back here

And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction

“I went, and I am still going.” 1

1 Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962






An Apology

I have never visited Russia. I can’t read or speak Russian. Everything in this series is as authentically Russian as a liter of vodka bottled in, oh, Baytown, Texas. Still, I hope you enjoy this dream-pilgrimage.

I never meant to write poems about Russia, but then I never meant to read Russian literature. The United States Navy was parsimonious in its pay to enlisted men in the 1960s, so the base library and the San Diego Public Library were my free entertainment (as was riding up and down the glass elevator at the Hotel El Cortez, and walking the city and Balboa Park with shipmates), and in illo tempore I happened upon a Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s short stories.

Although Tolkien, McKuen, and other English-language authors have always been my favorites (or favourites), I also found that Russian authors (in translation, of course) also have so much to teach the young and reassure the old. Despite seventy years of horror under Communism, Russia never lost the Faith and never lost her love for literature, literature that shapes chaos into meaning. In so many ways Russia is a witness to the world.

The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from a bookstall in the airport in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.

At this point the convention is to write that Yevtushenko changed my life forever, gave me an epiphany, and blah, blah, blah. He didn’t. If one’s life changes every time one reads a new author or hears a remarkable speaker or sees a great film, then was there a life to begin with?

But Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, and others came to be life-long friends. And since one writes about friends, I wrote about them too, and one day realized, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, that there might be a book in it.

Ruins of a CCC Camp, Arkansas - Photograph, Canon SLR

"Gov't Shutdown Risks an Undetected Asteroid Strike" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Gov’t Shutdown Risks an Undetected Asteroid Strike”

-news item

(I write this as a haiku since, apparently, we have little time left…)

Still, we conclude that

If an asteroid strikes us

We will detect it

John Keats Out by the Back Fence - Photograph, Nikon J1 (before the cheap plastic spring which keeps the battery in place failed, and which Nikon refused to remedy under their own warranty)

That Old "When I was in Graduate School" Thing...

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“When I was in Graduate School…”

“When I was in graduate school when I
Was at Oxford when I was working on
My doctorate at the Sorbonne when I
Was on my fellowship when I was hiking

The Andes on my gap year learning from
The Colorful Natives when I received
The Something-Something Prize for Young Poets
From The Oppressed Grant Recipients’ Front…”

One notices that

Literary articles never begin with
“When I was busting my knuckles on the drilling rig…”

Dawn - Photograph, Canon SLR

The Poets Have Been Remarkably Silent on the Subject of Firewood - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Poets Have Been Remarkably Silent on the Subject of Firewood

(as Chesterton did not say)

“…’on back…’on back…’on back…WHOA! Kill the motor.”
Leaning on the side of a pickup truck
Remembering the arcana of youth
On the farm: White Mule gloves, axe, splitting maul

Red oak, white oak, live oak, pine knot kindling
Three of us loading wood in the cloudy-cold
With practiced skill setting ranks of good oak
From the tailgate forward, settling the tires

Loading, unloading, stacking, and burning:
This winter’s firewood will warm us four times

The Physics of a Bridge, Baytown, Texas - IPhone photograph

We're All Icons Now - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

We’re All Icons Now

Is there anything left that isn’t iconic?
Each sports hero, actress, and tummy-tonic

Now let The People say “iconic”

Each recipe and coffee colonic
And every writer said to be Byronic

And let the reviewer chant “iconic”

Famous lovers, erotic or platonic
Mountains and islands, and plates tectonic

And let The Newsies type “iconic”

Animals natural or bionic
All weather systems, calm or cyclonic

And let Mr. Meteor cry “iconic!”

Every magazine is stuffed with “iconic”
Which any Byzantine would find ironic

And let the Romans cry “three dimensions!”

Wait...dimensions…declensions…these don’t rhyme with iconic…

Oh, and don’t forget that for every reviewer every writer weaves that same old layered tapestry of…something or other

And when you go home tonight just be sure to hug your children

This is not August - column re winter, snow, cardinals, burst pipes...

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

This is not August

As my MawMaw, of happy memory, used to say, the weather has been “airish.”

In yet another example of the settled science (cough) of global warming the temperatures dropped ‘way below freezing last week and, because there was a little bit of snow the newsies again and again filled time and space with vain repetitions of the tiresome and false “winter wonderland.”

Those who wake up on a 15-degree morning to discover a burst water line do not wax poetic about winter wonderlands.

One does not imagine that linemen, road crews, tow truck operators, police, fire, ambulance services, and others have ever alluded to working ten or more hours a day in freezing rain / sleet / hail as any sort of winter wonderland experience.

Because snow is uncommon here, the first flakes falling and swirling in eddies are fascinating. The cliché is that no two snowflakes are alike, but they seem to be, cold fluffs “that fall on my nose and eyelashes” (The Sound of Mucous) and look exactly alike, differing only in size.

As the snow accumulates it softens the contours of everything, and bounces the available alight around so nicely that it seems almost to be a light source itself. The dark winter woods gradually become light winter woods, and somehow quieter.

During freezes the squirrels and birds work the feeders, which need frequent re-fillings (hint – chicken scratch from the feed store is much less expensive than designated bird seed, and the critters are just as fat and sassy on their proletarian diet). The cardinals especially stand out in winter.

In cold weather the neatly stacked firewood from three summers of carefully saving trimmed limbs as neat billets descends further every day. Turning over the bottom course means turning hibernating frogs and worms and fierce-looking horned beetles out of their winter homes. One trusts that they simply grumble a bit and then dig deeper and resume their sleep.

After a day or so, when the sun reappears, the barometer aspires to higher things and the air seems to harden, the snow is like that last guest, the one who won’t go away. Ice melting from the roof drips musically from the icicles and to the ground, and road surfaces steam as the dark asphalt converts sunlight into heat through radiationless transition (and let the people say “Thermodynamics”).

The aging snow lurks along fencerows, the bases of trees, and dark corners, seeming to withdraw into itself. It is not pretty anymore, and hangs around for days until one afternoon you realize that, like your firewood, it is all gone.

Just as the parental complaint that “Your room looks like it was hit by a hurricane!” is not necessarily a metaphor in August, “It’s freezing in here!” is not necessarily a metaphor in January.

And this is not August!

-30-

When We Flew Among the Stars - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When We Flew Among the Stars

When we were children we lay in the grass
And counted the stars, but only up to
A hundred or so, because we got lost
But not out there in space, right here in space

For space had fallen here, all around us
Oh, don’t you remember? We were among
The stars, flying wildly through the silences
Beyond all time, beyond all sense of self

We almost found the secrets of Creation -
And then our mothers told us to come inside

Astrid-the-Wonder-Dachshund - Iphone photograph

Billy the Kid's Grave, Fort Sumner, New Mexico - Iphone photograph

Neo-Post-Colonial Artificial Intelligence Deconstructed - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Neo-Post-Colonial Artificial Intelligence Deconstructed

All intelligence is artificial
We do not huddle in burrows, issuing forth
Only to chase down other living things
Beat them to death, drink their blood, and eat them

We moderns huddle in cubes above the ground
With indoor plumbing through pipes that sometimes freeze
While we are gazing, searching for lost truths
In glowing screens made in slave-labor camps

And we have stopped slaughtering other creatures -
We have machines to do that for us now

Snow in East Texas - IPhone Photograph

Little Plastic Army Men in Action on a Snow Day - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Little Plastic Army Men in Action on a Snow Day

If I were a boy

I’d range my toy soldiers before the fire
Vast armies of plastic in green and grey
With the cannon blasting the enemy -
A glorious victory again today!

If I were a boy

I’d eat my morning cereal with Robin Hood
Propped up in his Whitman book before me
Its pages open to an England where
Every day is summer, green upon the lea

If I were a boy

My mother would remind me, to my sorrow
That I have a ‘rithmetic test tomorrow

Dad's Old Pickup - photograph

About that False Alarm in Hawaii... - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

I. From a Vietnamese / Cambodian / Egyptian / Israeli / Lebanese /

Sudanese / Syrian / Afghan Child’s Garden of Verses

Flare light
Flare bright
First flare I see tonight
I wish I may
I wish I might
Not be blown to death tonight

II. From an American Man’s Twooter of Self-Pity

Subtle beep
Subtle beep
‘wakening me from my sleep -
Oh, no! I’m going to die!
Not meeeeeee! Don’t wanna fry!
It’s all about ME – boo-hoo!
Poor ME! Poor ME! I’m gonna SUE!

A Take Away from the Take Away Steak Fingers - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Take Away from the Take Away Steak Fingers

     King Henry II: Forks?

     Thomas Becket: Yes, from Florence. New little invention. It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves
     you dirtying your fingers.

     King Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.

     Thomas Becket: Yes, but it's washable.

     King Henry II: So are your fingers. I don't see the point.

-Becket, 1964

Encapsulated in bivalves of foam
As bottom feeders in the fast-food chain
Small fragments of a poor dead cow, chopped, shaped
And formed into cow fingers that are not

For it behooves the diner thus to know
That cows haven’t any fingers at all
But the dear diner does, and digitally
Renders the cow fingers as nutrition

And that is all there is about cow fingers -
Not a topic on which the gourmet lingers

Still Life: Crucifix and Books - photograph

...Who Gives Joy to my Youth - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

…Who Gives Joy to my Youth

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

I will go in to the altar of God: to God who giveth joy to my youth.

-Daily Missal, 1962

For Brother Simon

A child thinks joy is all about the child
And so it is. And maybe an old man feels
That joy just isn’t for him anymore
To kneel his creaking joints before the truth

But it is

A wise man knows that he is still a child
An infant playing before the cave of winds
A Moses borne upon the ancient Nile
A shivering youth stepping into the Jordan

Though the lad be strong and the man be frail
Both are joyful children at the altar rail

Kirbyville, Texas at Night, ca 2008 - photograph

"Did Y'all Read About Those Chips in the Bible?" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Did Y’all Read About Those Chips in the Bible?”

In the Supermarket Checkout Line

“Did y’all read about those chips in the Bible?
Yessir, they got these chips now, and we ain’t
Gonna be able to buy or sell nothing
Without these here chips in our bodies

The C.I.A., some of those people got’em,
Yessir, and you ain’t going to the grocery store
And buyin’ nothin’ without ‘em. I read
Where it’s in th’ Bible, and, yessir, it is

Me, I’m standin’ on th’ World of th’ Lord
And I ain’t havin’ no chip put in, nossir”

Clouds and a Railway Crossing, Beaumont, Texas - photograph

"Go Inside Your Houses, Please" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Go Inside Your Houses, Please.”

“Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”1 You are
Well advised not to ask questions about
What happened here. Just move along;
There was never anything to see here.

“Go inside your houses, please. All these people
will be taken care of.”2 “You can search Twitter
using the search box below or return
to the home page.”1 Go inside your screens, please

All this awkwardness will be taken care of
Go inside your screens, please. Go inside. Please.

1 NBC
2 Doctor Zhivago, 1965

What Do You Take in Your Coffee Enema? - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

How Do You Take Your Coffee?

A famous actress – let us call her Ms. Coffee – suggests a somewhat different way of taking one’s morning cuppa.

Is there something wrong with the way we take our coffee now?

Coffee is a celebration of humanity. The morning cup of reveille pleasantly eases us from the happiness of sleep and into a quiet determination to make the work day a brilliant success.

The driver packs his Thermos along with his bills of lading, the office or factory worker takes ten for a recharge with others around the table in the break room, the copper takes a break from patrol down at the Stop ‘N’ Rob, retirees cluster at the supermarket coffee table every morning around nine, the Navy chief petty officer is out of uniform without his paws grasping a coffee cup, and the Air Canada cabin attendant dutifully snarls to the passengers that there is no coffee.

From chalices of glass, ceramics, paper, foam, or plastic, drinking coffee or tea with co-workers and friends almost seems to constitute a rite of secular communion. Except on Air Canada, where there is no coffee, and how dare you ask.

Ms. Coffee, though, suggests that we should take our coffee through the other end of the alimentary canal.

This would probably displace the mirth (Macbeth III.iv.109) at the corner table. Or any table. “Well, hey, I’d better get back to the shop floor; that number three machine’s been acting wonky…”

Ms. Coffee alludes to the, um, assumption of coffee via the nether regions as a deep detoxification, a supercharge, and a whole lotta other stuff using buzzy words. Further, Ms. Coffee refers the reader to a site that for over a hundred dollars sells an appliance for this, um, experience.

The drugstore sells such medical appliances a whole lot cheaper. If you’re interested, that is.

Ms. Coffee’s own website is amusing – she’s even got a real, live shaman who shaves his head and looks all spiritual and stuff – and she’s got lots of pills and merchandise to sell you, and she is herself that famous metaphorical picture of health.

But – with one t – we are all well-advised to visit a nurse-practitioner or physician for our health care needs, not a website.

And, hey, how do you take your coffee?

-30-

The Pig Stand, Beaumont, Texas - photograph

If Sneezes were Horses, then Beggars Would...Sneeze, Probably - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

If Sneezes were Horses, then Beggars Would…Sneeze, Probably

O man – what art thou? Thou’rt not mighty
Clingingly pathetically to a Kleenex box
Instead of wielding a conqueror’s sword
Lifting patent medicines, not wine, to thy lips

Thy sneezing and wheezing will not win thee worlds
The book unread though open in thy lap
Thy darked-orbed eyes unseeing and unseen
Thy wretched, reddened nose – all is despair

And snot that runs in foul, polluted streams
O man – thou art little more than Nyquil-dreams!

Red Sunrise - photograph

A Meditation Upon Matters of Faith and Math - some of the shabbiest doggerel ever...

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Meditation Upon Matters of Faith

And the Worthy and Diligent Study

of the Arcana of Mathematics

as Recommended to Industrious and Thoughtful

Young Men and Women

For Kyle,

Who is Enduring His First College Maths

Our Saviour never said “Now solve for X”
Such is not written in any sacred tex(t)

Saints Paul and Barnabas on journeys Psidian
Did not refer to topics Euclidian

The Corinthians were divided only by factions
Never were they divided by fractions

Good St. Paul wanted all to comprehend
The truth, and not some subtle subtrahend

But still…

But still (to me it is a great frustration)
Numbers are how we measure Creation

With them we plant the Garden that is earth
Building it up with word and work and worth

So that we feed and clothe and mend and tend
With crop rows plowed, panels welded, cattle penned

Airplanes launched, fires put out, and light bulbs lit
Messages sent – there is no end of it!

So brew yourself a cup of coffee
Find your Euclid and dust it off(y)

Work those angles on your protractor
Add, subtract, calculate, and factor

Apply yourself most assiduously
Soon you’ll be an engineer, you’ll see!

Admired by all, a man of great knowledge –
And it began in community college

An Old Man Running While Carrying a Volume of The World Book Encyclopedia - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Old Man Running While Carrying a Volume of The World Book Encyclopedia

A Scene from a Hospital Waiting Room

Cups of coffee are reverently borne
Along the bright hospital corridors
By nurses, doctors, technicians, and all
Scrub-suited healers on their dutiful rounds

But wait! A lean, energetic old man
His wild white hair brimming his gimme cap
Dodges among the sacred cups, and runs
Up the stairs to the ICU waiting room

Clutching an old encyclopedia
Like a dispatch from the front –
                                                      I wish I’d asked

Kirbyville Elementary School, 2nd Grade, 1955-1956 - photograph

Photograph by D.T. Kent, Jr., of happy memory

Feast of the Epiphany - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Feast of the Epiphany

Grey days recede into dreary, drizzling dusks
Baptismal rains across the windows slip
And even the candlelight is not proof
Against the gathering gloom of heartfall

Shakespeare leans uncertainly on the shelf
And agonizes over his writer’s block
Milton is writing yet another tract
On faith while smoking Players cigarettes

Warnie and Jack are out for a brisk walk
And Tollers is busy correcting proofs
Under a yellow puddle of lamplight
Bleak Spenser in his grief Kilcolman weeps

We all hold castles abandoned and burnt
Friendships grown mouldy, squabbles unresolved
Walks not taken, rough drafts uncorrected
Pipes gone quite out, cups of tea gotten cold

Has it been that long since I saw you last?
Come in; I’ll put the kettle on for tea
Just leave your coat and brolly by the door
Come sit by the fire; come, and talk with me

Russian Children on Christmas Eve - poem

Russian Children on Christmas Eve

Good children dress warmly to watch for the star
The star of Bethlehem, the shepherds’ star
The star of the magi, true-guiding star
And more than all of these, the children’s star

If children fall asleep during the Royal Hours
It is fitting and just; they too are royal,
Princes and princesses of the Emperor
And of that Child who in the manger slept

Then home to kutya, and so to their beds -
The Saviour blesses all dear little sleepyheads!

S rozhdyestvom Hristovym!


(In Orthodoxy the 6th of January is Christmas Eve)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snowlight - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snowlight

White snowlight, glowlight, brightening the woods
By praying down the sky to float among
The dark and creaking pillars of ancient oaks
Whose trunks and limbs are black with clinging ice

Drear, mouldering autumn leaves now lie at rest
Beneath soft-shoaling ripples of rare snow
Pale, iridescent light dances between
The clouds and the ground, and then back again

Shadowless colorings, pearlings, and frosts
At play with miracles in January.

Down at the Auto Repair - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Down at the Auto Repair - A Waiting Room Discourse

Blah blah blah Trump blah blah blah Bannon blah
Blah blah blah da(ng)ed schools blah blah it’s all
Fake news blah blah blah double-blah media
Clintons blah blah blah kids these days blah blah

Blah buzz buzz buzz that wouldn’t have happened
In my day blah blah blah I can’t believe
What they’re charging blah blah blah FEMA blah
Blah Trump blah blah they don’t want us to know

Blah blah blah da(ng)ed schools blah blah it’s all
Fake news blah blah blah double-blah Jesus

(You can turn it over if you want, but the other side’s just the same)

Meditation on a Ten-Dollar Timex Watch - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Meditation on a Ten-Dollar Timex Watch

A watch doesn’t really tell time, you know
Its tiny mechanism sweeps three hands
Around a dial locked in a little case
Upon a strap buckled around your wrist

And there it imitates the planet’s spin
And the planet’s spin is ordained by God
And the watch’s spin is ordained by man
So that we get to our haircuts on time

The solar system is a mighty work -
And a visit to the barber is nice

Is the End Near for Religion? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Is the End Near for Religion?

-news item

No one will ever acknowledge a MePhone
As the Lord of the universe, or as
The Creator from before created time
Born of an IBM Selectric

True plastic of true limited resources,
Sing Advent hymns unto an Apple II,
Whisper aves on a strand of transistors,
Or genuflect before a Model T

No consecration will ever obtain
Upon the altar of a microchip

A New Day of Freedom - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A New Dawn of Freedom

A new dawn of freedom? May it be so
Even in this artificial shift of time
According to those calendars and clocks
Who still attribute virtues to old Janus

For this is Mary’s day, especially so,
This last day in the Octave, now at dawn
And She is our new Dawn of freedom given,
Our Porta Caeli, Bearer of Our Lord

Now with the light we rise to greet the Light
A new dawn of freedom – and it is so