Farewell to an Old Comrade - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Farewell to an Old Comrade

 

He yaf not of that text a pulled hen

That seith that hunters ben nat hooly men

 

-Chaucer, Prologue, 177-178

 

A man visits his pal in the hospice room

Two great old pals, best friends from boyhood

In school and in the Army together

Best men at each other’s weddings long ago

 

Hunting trips, laughter, campfires, and coffee

They tramped the woods and fields into old age

Until the arthritis house-bound them at last

But, peace:

A good man whispers farewell to his dying friend:

 

“I remember our tramps through the mists on the moors –

And can I have that fine old Purdey of yours?”

The Turning of the World: Advent through Plough Monday - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Turning of the World: Advent through Plough Monday

 

God spede the plough

 

-an English blessing for a good agricultural year,

numerous sources

 

In springtime Nature kisses the world with light

And summer follows with work and merriment

In autumn she kisses the world good night

And winter follows with frost and lament

 

But first we celebrate the great world’s turning

With Advent and the holy Christmas time

With liturgies followed by the Yule log burning

Through feasting and cheer, and each well-sung rhyme

 

Six midwinter weeks ‘til the Three Kings appear

And then Plough Monday to begin the new year

Thanksgiving Dinner with Generous Helpings of Biological Functions - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Thanksgiving Dinner

with Generous Helpings of Biological Functions

 

Would you please pass the bowel-movement stories

Gosh, this lab-test casserole sure looks great

I love the well-steamed vasectomy glories

And a helping of dentistry on my plate

 

This year I fried the potassium levels

They taste as yummy as a cancer scare

And here’s heart surgery with our revels

For Christmas I’m getting a new potty chair

 

The kids have gone outside, oh what a fuss -

Why don’t they want to have dinner with us?

In Praise of a Candle - poem

 Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

In Praise of a Candle

 

These are thy gifts; they are good

 

-Saint Augustine, City of God, Book 15, Chapter 22

 

A votive candle is good, and prayers are good

And those for whom the candle is lit are good

Especially when they feel they are not good

Because they are His gifts, and they are good

 

When we light a candle for someone else

We light it for ourselves, all without knowing

In the workings of the Ekonomia

Because we are His gifts, and we are good

 

In spite of ourselves – we must accept it

As the little candle shines on through the night

Homeschool, Screenschool, Noschool - weekly column

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Homeschool, Screenschool, Noschool

 

Pat Wheeler: “A game-legged old man and a drunk. Is that all you got?”

Sheriff John T. Chance: “That’s what I’ve got.”

 

-Rio Bravo

 

Today’s first lesson is that no such construct as “homeschool” obtains, either as a noun or as a verb. When your father taught you hunting safety he did not homeschool you; he taught you. If your sixth-grade teacher taught you not to spit tobacco into the classroom litter basket because your parents failed in their duty of teaching basic hygiene, manners, and dignity, he did not schoolhome you.

 

And, yes, when I first taught sixth grade the local customs of chawin’, dippin’, spittin’, and dying from mouth cancer in early adulthood came as a surprise.

 

We learn in all of life’s situations; we do not homelearn or schoollearn. After our first few encounters with our fellow pilgrims we also teach in all of life’s situations; we do not hometeach or schoolteach.

 

Thank you for your kind attention.

 

Today’s second lesson is about, oh, screenschooling, also known as distance learning or asymmetrical learning.

 

It’s not much good. That reality should have been learned (or schoolschooled) over ten years ago, when the fashion began: students in different towns are clustered before Orwellian telescreens while much time is wasted on several monitors in several different places try to make all the electronic mummery work.

 

And yet screenschooling might be metaphorical mannah in the CV desert – it’s not a steak dinner at Delmonico’s, but for a time of wandering it will have to do. As Sheriff Chance says, it’s what you’ve got.

 

The only way screenschooling can kinda / sorta work is for parents to be parents, to get the kidlets up on time, feed them breakfast, require them to dress in their school clothes, seat them at the kitchen table (not a couch or bed), and then supervise them while accomplishing other household chores.

 

And, anyway, aren’t there books and musical instruments and small animals and paper and pens and paintboxes and houseplants and tools and all the other appurtenances of civilization in your home now?

 

For now your children don’t have access to classrooms, school breakfasts, school lunches, laboratories, gyms, playing fields, structure, expectations, or game-legged old men.

 

What your children have now is you. Be the parent, not a roommate. To paraphrase Cole Thornton in El Dorado, don’t leave a boy alone at the kitchen table to do a man’s job.

 

-30-

 

 

Keats Helps Carry a Cat to the Veterinarian - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Keats Helps Carry a Cat to the Veterinarian

 

[I]f Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all

 

-John Keats, Letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818 ¹

 

The leaves come naturally from the trees today

As autumn floats away, onto the pages of life

Memories set down, one word at a time

Or phrases scribbled in heart-leaping haste

 

But in humility the poor poet perceives

That lines often don’t come naturally at all

Resisting as fiercely as hissing cats

Being crated for a trip to the vet

 

No

 

Poetry doesn’t come as easily as all that -

Come, Mr. Keats, and help me with this cat!

 

 

¹ John Keats – "Keats's Axioms" -- Letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818 | Genius

 

Prien Lake, November 2020

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Prien Lake, November 2020

 

Waterfowl honk, quack, sing, and fish

Among floating insulation and foam

Near to the foundered wreckage of a boat

Along the shore, where sits a plastic chair

 

A discount-store throne in isolation

Set forth in rich, primeval mud where live

The little creatures whose logical end

Is in a fish or in a gumbo dish

 

A hurricane of hours is sorrow for years

In ancient, endless work, and occasional tears

All His Stuff is Monogrammed - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

All His Stuff is Monogrammed

 

The man of destiny considers his glass

Monogrammed with his manly initials

Next to his monogrammed bone china plate

And his monogrammed solid silver ware

 

The man of destiny checks his monogrammed watch

Gleaming in gold next to his monogrammed cuffs

Sitting in at his monogrammed office desk

Behind his monogrammed sitting-room door

 

And perhaps he gloats, at the very end:

“Look at all my monogrammed stuff!  I win!”

 

They say the Russians kept some of his teeth

A Lust-Crazed Darwinian - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Lust-Crazed Darwinian

 

Isaiah 11:6-9

 

Outside the window I see in the autumn oak

A face-off between a squirrel and a cat

Small cat. Large squirrel. Insults given and received

They would kill each other, just like humans

 

The Romantic wants to see them at play

The Darwinian wants to see who wins

And if the squirrel would eat the brains of the cat

Just as the cat would eat the brains of the squirrel

 

And leave little headless corpses on my porch

Which is why I am a hopeful Romantic

A Busy Dachshund Puppy - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Busy Dachshund Puppy

 

She leaves you a gift on the kitchen floor

And another on the living-room rug

And barfs up half a frog just inside the door

And barfs again – a poorly-digested bug

 

She bites into cranky old Pepper-Cat’s tail

(Something so twitchy must surely taste good)

And Pepper-Cat spanks her; oh, what a wail!

(Dear pup, there’s a difference between could and should)

 

And in the evening, while you doze over a book

She rests upon your heart, and gives you that look

And her big eyes ask,

                                  Am I your very good dog?

 

Oh, yes

For Presidents and Others - A Meditation on Aging Gracefully

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

When a Man is Old

 

For Presidents and Others:

A Meditation on Aging Gracefully

 

Now when a man is young, he gives his strength

In service to his nation and the Faith

In war and peace, and at his family hearth

In work, and in his humble place at Mass

 

But when a man his old, he then should choose

To ‘change his work for a good walking stick

And sit outside the Blue Boar Inn with pipe

And glass and friends and happy memories

 

There is honor in manly endeavors

And honor in finally letting them go

Barney Fife! Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

 

Barney Fife! Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour

 

-as William Wordsworth did not say

 

Police chiefs are costumed as admirals these days

Or as generals, with medals and eagles and stars

Peaked caps and polished boots, more Patton than Patton

In stern command of parking-lot plywood lecterns

 

Their trousers are crisply pressed, as are their frowns

And all their seams line up with military precision

Each gold and silver button polished as befits

Leaders formidable to civilization’s foes

 

And thus they appear, gloriously attired

Explaining to their people why they’ve just been fired

 

 

(I admire police - beat cops, the proper coppers - but the resume’ builders who rise to high office and dress up like Hohenzollern postal clerks are another matter.)

 

A Miracle of Second Sight - weekly column

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Miracle of Second Sight

 

Sight is a miracle. Sight restored is even more so.

 

Last week I had occasion to drive a friend to his ophthalmologist in Lake Charles, Louisiana.

 

I was worried about the sudden deterioration in eyesight (he seemed to be calmer about it, but then he is quietly devout and a better man than I), and grew more worried as the afternoon wore on in the doctor's waiting room, but finally he appeared. The ophthalmologist had made a diagnosis and performed the unplanned laser surgery then and there,

 

We drove away, my friend in those funny black plastic eyeshades, and searched out road coffee for the drive back to Texas.

 

The first chain fast-food place we found still wore its building sign but was wrecked and boarded up.

 

The second place, the same.

 

The third was a hit, although we had to navigate around a truck and crew lifting up a new sign. That’s what you see in Lake Charles this autumn, the restoration of signs, along with continued cleanup. Lake Charles is still a mess after two major hurricanes this summer, with wreckage everywhere, street signs gone, houses blasted and empty, shops blasted and empty, work crews and volunteers along some streets, nothing along others. 

 

As we sat at a window table with our coffee I noticed that my friend’s eyes were no longer dilated, and suggested that he try to read something. So he lifted his paper cup to his eyes and with great joy read a famous text of our time, “Warning. Contents may be hot.”

 

And my friend’s eyesight grew better by the minute. Wonderful!

 

When I walked him into the opht…hmmm…eye doctor’s office he could not see. When he walked out three hours later he could.

 

Miracle. Laser surgery. Miracle. Ophthalmologist. Miracle.

 

A humorous bit is that on the way my friend was remonstrating with me for missing turns: "Can't you see the sign? I can't see the signs, but I'm blind!"  In the event, I could not see the road, street, and advertising signs because most of them had been blown away by the hurricanes and some had not yet been restored.  Our conversation, then, was much like the two elderly gentlemen on a train in a Jeeves and Wooster story:

 

1st Gent: "I say, is this Wembley?"

 

2nd Gent: "No, this is Thursday."

 

1st Gent: "So am I - let's have a drink!"

 

Life is good.

 

Peace,

 

-30-

What I Found While Cleaning a Faeries' Well - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

What I Found While Cleaning a Faeries’ Well

 

Perhaps it was because I cleared the vines

The ancient vines, with tools of iron, of steel

And traced the circles of the well’s lost lines

With my unhallowed hands, by touch and by feel

 

Or that I wore my boots, or forgot my prayers

To the White Lady said to haunt this place

Or whistled secular songs, careless airs

Until the dusk, when I came face-to-face…

 

I have lived to tell of this wildest of adventures

I found on the lichened stone – a set of dentures

 

 

Despite my disapproval of exposition:

 

Until we became Roman and respectable, my Celtic and English ancestors made offerings at sacred wells associated with pixies and fairies and a mysterious White Lady, or Sheela na Gig.

 

I regret that the old well in my yard, the surviving structure from an old farmstead, is probably not a sacred well, or at least no more than any other well. While I was cleaning away the English ivy (which in English folklore binds lovers), I found on the edge of a brick a denture plate from years ago.

 

When I have finished cleaning the well, covering it with a sturdy concrete disc for safety, and topping it with a wrought-iron arch, I will add a crucifix.

 

I hope the resident Sheela / White Lady won’t mind.

 

Only my Friend has his Vision Again - poem

 

A Loss of Vision

 

As we grow older we grow honester,

that's something.

 

-Yevtushenko, “Zima Junction”

 

I drove a friend to his ophthalmologist

When I walked him into the office

He could perceive only light and shadow

After we left, some four hours later

 

He could read the fine print on his McDonald's coffee cup

 

Miracle. Laser surgery. Miracle.

 

The McDonald's was our third place to try

For coffee; the first two chains were empty and wrecked

Lake Charles is still a mess after hurricane-curses

This summer, with wreckage everywhere, street signs gone

 

Houses blasted and empty, shops blasted and empty

Work crews along some streets, silence along others

 

Dear Leader never bothered to notice

The new Dear Leader won't bother to notice

They send our children overseas to bomb people

And build them new infrastructure and then

 

Bomb everything again

 

We are trying to be good Americans

Our golf-course presidents and

Keyboard-kommando generalissimos

And feeble Merovingian Congress

 

Fist-bump each other

 

Only my friend has his vision again

Puerile Political Doggerel, with Apologies to Dogs

 

Puerile Political Doggerel, with Apologies to Dogs

 

How bad does a candidate have to be

                                      To lose to Mr. Trump

How bad does a candidate have to be

                                      To lose to Mr. Biden

For four long years our country

                                      Has decayed in a dump

For the next four years

                                      I might go into hidin’

Doing the Laundry (too thrilling) - poem

 

Doing the Laundry

 

Doing the household laundry is rather fun

The old roundy-go-thump washing machine

Roundy-go-thumps in time to the dishwasher

While the electric dryer waits patiently

 

Someday I will have a clothesline again

And summer days and summer sun will love

My shirts and towels so sweetly dry that they

Will want to fly away on the summer breeze

 

And when the clothes have been folded away

The sun will want to come inside to play

And the Maps and Charts of Your Soul - poem

 

And the Maps and Charts of Your Soul

 

Maps help us navigate the land

Charts help us navigate the sea

All of them, when drawn out by hand

Are works of art, as you well see

Her Brief Candle - poem

 

Her Brief Candle

 

“Do we all holy rites…”

 

-Henry V, IV.viii.118

 

Her candle was too brief

 

But she was here

And she gave us joy

 

Conventionalities are no good now:

We are all stricken in the loss of a child

A happy child, in whom we are forever blessed

Today and forever, in happy remembrance

 

But still, it hurts

She’s not here now

 

Are we asking too much

That she should be?

 

No

 

Because if she were here

She would give meaning to our feeble words

 

“Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and make perpetual Light to shine upon her.”

You Do Not Prune an Apple Tree - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

You Do Not Prune an Apple Tree

 

You do not prune an apple tree, oh, no

You must become one with the apple tree

With saw and loppers, not unlike a surgeon

An especially conscientious one

 

The intrusions of vines must be excised

And the cancerous rubbish growths pulled away

Dead limbs must be diagnosed and sawn down

And the poor weeping ends tended with love

 

You tell the tree to take the winter off

And call you first thing in the coming spring

Cafe' Renee' - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

 

Café’ Renee’

 

Listen very carefully; I shall say this only once.

 

-Michelle of the Resistance

 

Café Renee’ is still open in Nouvion

Close to the coast, except when it isn’t

In a petit monde of possibilities

Even when the outside world is going wrong

 

Let us find a table close enough to hear

Lieutenant Geering and Colonel von Strom

Whispering conspiracies about paintings and plots

Until Madame Edith screeches out a song

 

Renee’ brings us a cognac as always

And we know the fun is about to begin

 

 

Another Lockdown? - weekly column

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Another Lockdown?

 

Another lockdown?

 

We haven’t been unlocked from the first one.

 

Masks are still required – and rightly so – as are social distancing, sheets of clear plastic in all businesses, health questions before appointments, those menacing little plastic temperature guns that gatekeepers aim at our foreheads, hand sanitizer, anti-viral aerosols, ventilation, and the good hygienic practices our parents and teachers taught us.

 

I live beneath the approach to Houston Intercontinental, and I can sit outside in the fresh autumn air in the evenings and remark on the now rare experience of seeing an airplane made brilliant in the hidden sun as it descends with its manifests of people hoping to find their hearts’ delight at their journey’s end.

 

The multi-named virus is real. The spouse-person and I can count two friends and some twelve acquaintances who have died from it in our rural county.

 

But the denials continue and the masks do not.

 

The afternoon casualty lists on the local news always end with words to the effect of, “All but one had pre-existing conditions.”

 

The slackers.

 

Some reporters have a gift of making it sounding Darwinian, as if the dead were somehow at fault.

 

Some 60,000 young Americans were killed in Viet-Nam (my frame of reference; I’m old) – no one ever thought to add, “but most of them had pre-existing conditions.”

 

There are few communities who haven’t lost some of their finest young men and women in the numerous undeclared wars so beloved of our governments for generations. Yet not even the most callous presidents and the mostly harmless members of Congress have attempted to calm the families of the dead with assurances (or accusations?) of pre-existing conditions.

 

If the remains of your child or young friend are returned home from some Whodumbideawasthisistan, there would be no comfort to the family in the chaplain saying, “but she had a pre-existing condition.”

 

But the perhaps 250,000 killed by the CV (or whatever it’s being called this month) are dismissed almost casually with the sneaky deflection of, “well, most them had pre-existing conditions.”

 

Everyone has a pre-existing health condition; there are no perfect physical specimens. 

 

The reality is that refrigerated trailers aren’t lined up at hospitals because of pre-existing conditions. People aren’t set out in crowded corridors or tents on oxygen or ventilators  because of broken legs, measles, ‘flu, colds, migraines, appendicitis, or hurt feelings.

 

They’re dying of the CV.

 

So put away the ego and the ideologies.

 

Go to work and wear your mask.

 

Wash your hands. Often.

 

Keep your distance.

 

Mind your coughing.

 

Take your temperature.

 

Slather on the hand sanitizer.

 

Keep MeeMaw and PawPaw alive.

 

Keep your children alive.

 

Keep yourself alive.

 

Peace.

 

-30-

The Cliche' is to Say That We Didn't See It Coming - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

 

The Cliché is to Say That We Didn’t See It Coming

 

A happy child, cuddling one of her pets -

That’s the picture they used for her obituary

 

We didn’t see it coming

for Remembrance Day / Veterans' Day - poem

 

Something About Life

 

“Live.  Just live.”

 

-Yuri in Doctor Zhivago

 

The plane lifted, and the cheering was wild

And then pretty quickly the pilot said

“We are now clear of Vietnamese

Territorial waters.”  There was joy,

Even wilder cheering for most, and quiet

Joy for a few.  For me, Karamazov

To hand, peace, and infinite gratitude.

“I’m alive,” I said to myself and to God,
“Alive.  I will live, after all.”  To read, to write,

Simply to live.  Not for revolution,

Whose smoke poisons the air, not for the war,

Not to withdraw into that crippling self-pity

Which is the most evil lotus of all,

But to live.  To read, to write.

                                            But death comes,

Then up the Vam Co Tay, or now in bed,

Or bleeding in a frozen February ditch;

Death comes, scorning our frail, feeble, failing flesh,

But silent then at the edge of the grave,

For all graves will be empty, not in the end,

But in the very beginning of all.

A Catechism of Brokenness - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Catechism of Brokenness

 

The celebrant breaks the Body in two

The Body is broken

The celebrant is broken

The communicant is broken

 

Only the Word is whole: “This is My Body…”

 

The celebrant breaks the Body in two

That it may be shared

Broken again

And shared further along

 

Only the Word is whole: “This is My Body…”

 

The Celebrant breaks the Body in two

That in the sequenced brokenness

In all the little broken Pieces

One-ness may come

The Geometry of Intersectionality - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Geometry of Intersectionality

 

1. Crossroads

 

Intersections aren’t crossroads, you know

Where you can choose to stop a while and talk

With a man walking some other way in life

And learn something over a borrowed cigarette

 

2. Intersections

 

At intersections you never meet anyone

It’s all about obedience to lights and signs

And painted arrows in the road that seem

To point everywhere except where you want to go

 

3. Stop-for-awhile signs

 

There are stop signs in life. You have to stop

But then you go – a stop sign isn’t forever

What Went Ye into the Casino to See? - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

What Went Ye into the Casino to See?

 

Shootings at a Las Vegas Casino

 

-news item

 

What went ye into the casino to see -

A numbered mandala spinning truth on red

A James Bond manque in a cartoon tee

A tatted Sylvia Trench wheezing a joint?

 

What went ye into the casino to see -

A clapped-out Toyota cruising the drag

Mysterious encounters behind the Denny’s

Getting lucky in the Lucky 7 Motel?

 

Does a man learn at last what life really means

Choking in blood among the slot machines?

 

 

Cf. St. Matthew 11:7

Theology of the Garden Bench - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Theology of the Garden Bench

 

God’s good, green earth is holy, and must be reverenced

As an act of His Creation, a work of His hands

And of His breath, His singing into being

This glorious epiphany in which we live

 

Our little children live close upon the earth

Laughing and tumbling through the summer grass

With kittens and puppies as their happy playmates

Sweet Eden’s innocence echoed in them all

 

And we with our weary, creaky old bones

Repose like royalty on an old wooden bench

 

And give thanks