We Haven't Had to Bury Anyone in the Garden - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

We Haven’t Had to Bury Anyone in the Garden

 

Hands shivering while insulating the pipes

Extra cover and food for the animals

Antifreeze for the car; are the neighbors okay

Some of the store shelves are empty, but we’ll make do

 

We have a generator if the power fails

And lots of wood for the stove in the den

A good camp stove and a coffee pot

A roof over our heads and intact walls

 

Because we’re on this side of the ocean

No gunfire, air-raid warnings, or bombs

A Komboskini for Christmas - short poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

                               A Komboskini for Christmas

 

For Christmas I gave my friend a komboskini

The seller said it was made on Mount Athos

Though I in my modern cynicism suggested Shanghai

But I might have been wrong

And This the Happy Morn - weekly column 18 December 2022

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

And This the Happy Morn

 

This is the month, and this the happy morn,

      Wherein the Son of Heav'n's eternal King,

Of wedded Maid, and Virgin Mother born,

      Our great redemption from above did bring

 

-From “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” John Milton

 

The Bee Lady and her helper visited the other day, bringing jars of honey to help us celebrate Advent, Christmas, and breakfast. We host some of her hives, and it is a joy to see those bees working the seasons of flowering plants and trees and sipping from the pools of fresh water we keep for them. Bees are essential for our lives, for without their industry in pollinating crops we would not eat. Flowers and honey are a happy bonus.

 

No one has yet messed up Advent (aka “The Christmas Season,” which it is not), and so we are spared Advent sales and Advent gifts and Advent movies and news stories babbling about The True Meaning of Advent. Advent is a season that points to the Nativity, not to itself.

 

But this liturgical season of quiet anticipation is blessed with quiet joys anyway: gifts of local honey, for instance, and folks sending each other homemade cookies and homemade pies and homemade rum cake. A neighbor gave us a bundle of lightered-pine kindling, now relatively rare. I’m not going to start a fire with it anytime soon; simply to smell the scent, the East Texas incense of lightered-pine is to be taken back to childhood on the farm.

 

Advent and Christmas are seasons in the liturgical calendar, of course, but culturally they are also seasons of remembrance. This part can go wrong because of the unreasonable expectations in our cargo-cult sub-culture. Things are nice (I’m open to a Rolex, a Leica, and a new car, okay?), but as an old saying goes, God is not at the end going to ask any of us how much our car cost.  I’m a sentimentalist – I think that years from now a man or woman will remember happily a childhood doll, train, Christmas dress, fire truck, or first purse much more than expensive, look-at-how-much-I-spent, battery-powered gimcrackery that was outdated even as it was manufactured.

 

I have such a happy Christmas remembrance of my Uncle Bob giving us boys lengths of small, kid-size rope which he had worked into real cowboy lassos. I was never good at lassoing anything other than fence posts and my father’s deer-dog (and I got into trouble for that), but that bit of hand-worked line is the sort of memory that stays with a man in a way that expensive, plastic, made-in-Shanghai landfill cannot.

 

And then there was Aunt Lola’s divinity candy. And Grandmama’s teacakes. And a Christmas tree from our own patch of woods. Bing Crosby on the pickup truck radio. The Rug-Rat playing with her new Barbie in a sunlit window. Sigh.

 

As Mr. Milton says, the center of Christmas is “the happy morn,” but all the other joys are wonderful too.

 

Merry Christmas.

 

-30-

Here May You See the Tyrant - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Here May You See the Tyrant

 

And live to be the show and gaze o’ th’ time.
We’ll have thee, as our rarer monsters are,
Painted upon a pole, and underwrit
“Here may you see the tyrant.”

 

-Macbeth V.viii.28-31

 

Once upon a time he strutted across the stage

Peering into a cauldron presented to him

And stirring it about for a viler taste

Soul-sickness for sale from a poisoned chalice

 

But now he lurks in his dime-store Dunsinane

Conjuring magic baubles that do not exist

Comic-book ikons of himself for sale

To sucker the intellectually innocent

 

He cannot admit that his life was a lie

A non-fungible token to its end

Children Following the Star on Christmas Eve - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Children Following the Star

                                                                   on Christmas Eve

 

For Jack and Cate

 

Who aren’t exactly children now

Except to us old folks who love them

 

      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 night

      It is fitting and just; they wait for the Light - 

      The star has led them in its arcing flight

      To worship God in Christmas’ ancient rite

 

      Then home to a late supper, and so to their beds -

      The Infant Jesus blesses our dear little sleepyheads!

A London That Never Was - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A London That Never Was

 

The London of Boswell never truly was

And yet it is the truest London of all:

Coffee at The Turk’s Head, beer at The Mitre

Not much minding either bishops or Turks

 

A pipe and a pint with Johnson and the greats:

Oliver Goldsmith, Reynolds and Garrick

Hester Thrale, and Boswell, of course

Books and papers and arguments and poems

 

If we are going to visit London someday

We had better visit Boswell and Johnson first

Why Should I Always Fly with a Tennis Ball? - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Why Should I Always Fly with a Tennis Ball?

 

The ad is served like a tennis ball

Across the net and just out of bounds

A tennis ball wouldn’t hog the armrest

But I’d much rather travel with a friend

 

You, perhaps, if you bring along a book

Or maybe a crossword, but not a video game

We could look up from the page and ask

The attendant for a pot of tea for two

                  

Traveling with you would be ever so grand          

Because

A tennis ball could never hold your hand

Universal All-Purpose InterGossip Post Response for The Year of Our Daily Mail 2022

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Universal All-Purpose InterGossip Post Response

for The Year of Our Daily Mail 2022

 

Tinder box iconic cannon fodder

iconic clown show iconic clown circus

iconic clown car iconic clown train

iconic absolute clown show train iconic

he didn’t get the memo iconic

you had one job iconic I have no words

iconic new and selected iconic

subvert iconic at its best iconic

I’m getting the popcorn iconic much

iconic subversive iconic witch hunt

iconic fairy tale wedding iconic

unsung iconic what could possibly go wrong

iconic there, there fixed it for you iconic

FACT I’ll wait iconic oh, wait iconic

snake-oil salesman iconic taking the world

by storm iconic all aboard the crazy train

iconic you could google it iconic

tightknit community iconic worst

case scenario iconic Tinder box

iconic cannon fodder iconic

he didn’t get the memo iconic

you had one job iconic I have no words

iconic new and selected iconic

subvert iconic at its best iconic

much iconic subversive iconic

witch hunt iconic fairy tale wedding

iconic unsung iconic what could

possibly go wrong iconic there,

fixed it for you iconic FACT iconic

I’ll wait iconic oh, wait iconic

snake oil salesman iconic taking the world

by storm iconic you could google it

iconic tightknit community iconic

worst case scenario iconic end of

iconic quelle surprise iconic wheelhouse

iconic dog and pony show iconic

iconic in the crosshairs iconic

jaw dropping iconic supply chain iconic

decolonize iconic post-colonial

iconic neo-colonial iconic

just dropped iconic unshackled writers

iconic quagmire iconic not out of the woods

just wow iconic facepalm iconic

LOL iconic pulled out all the stops

iconic systematic racism iconic

systemic racism iconic structural

racism iconic RINO iconic

Demoncrat iconic Republicrap

iconic bombshell iconic game changer

iconic wow iconic just wow iconic

end of story iconic tight knit iconic

field day iconic perfect storm iconic

winter wonderland iconic

Setting a Cat Among the Pigeons - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Setting a Cat Among the Pigeons

 

After two months

I filed a complaint with the insurance company

After four months

I filed a complaint with the state insurance board

 

Neither the cat nor the pigeons are much moved

Except to disapprove of me for noticing

 

That nothing much has moved

The Decline of the British Empire - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Decline of the British Empire

 

Whatever happens

We have got

Milton and Shakespeare

And they have not

 

But this is what

They have got:

A strong economy

And we have not

 

(Based on a bit of 19^th century triumphalist doggerel, attributed to Hilaire Belloc and others, about the Maxim gun. And let The People shout, “Decolonize these lines!”)

The Second and Most Efficient Memory Device - weekly column 11 December 2022

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Second and Most Efficient Memory Device

 

The concept of the free public library with access to all is, like rural electrification programs, public roads, untaxed airwaves, public schools, university agricultural extensions, and other outreach plans, an expression of the burst of genius and energy that helped make this nation great.  The idea that all citizens, rich or poor, should have access to learning, freedom of movement, the exchange of ideas, and possibilities for self-improvement does not originate in America but this is the nation that made it work.

 

For most of human history access to learning, to the ability to read and write and measure the world and map the stars, to participate freely in what the Romans called the res publica (the republic, that is, the public life), was limited to a relatively small upper class.  England, for instance, gave the world the genius of Shakespeare; America saw to it that everyone had access to Shakespeare.

 

The stunning and inexplicable failures of access via racial, gender, and class biases demonstrate the point that possibilities must be available to all, and that a universally literate citizenry makes life better for all of us.

 

Books have always been expensive, but the American invention of pulping wood for paper in the 19^th century made them less so. The free public library meant that those still-pricey volumes would circulate among the people as does the air, the air of freedom.

 

Libraries have changed, and in many ways not for the better. In our time the successful and stabilizing repositories of knowledge and aesthetics have been seen by some as weapons of ideology, with the promotion of limited points of view and the attendant suppression of others. Public libraries have sometimes been required by the governing authorities to serve as non-emergency homeless shelters and as centers of political activity.

 

In times of crisis, yes, a library or any other building can be used for shelter. A great many libraries in Ukraine, for instance, are of necessity helping keep the dispossessed housed. But housing is not what a library is otherwise for.

 

The freedom to assemble peaceably is an essential value of our republic (with its very democratic systems of voting), but serving as the headquarters of a political party or ideology of any kind is not what a library is for.

 

Adult men and women are free to attend certain entertainments, but those entertainments are not what a library is for.  No one ever entered the Cheyenne Social Club or Miss Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon to demand that the girls cover up and the boys put down their beers for an hour’s discussion of the Wife of Bath and Lady Macbeth as symbols of feminist empowerment.

 

All things to their proper venues.

 

And let’s get real – news features about some guy costuming himself as Elsie the Cow in makeup for a function staged in a public library are news because they are as rare as they are inappropriate. It doesn’t happen here, and it won’t. Librarians are guardians of civilization; posturing loudmouths with bullhorns are not.

 

On the other hand, there’s all the unhappy content in the MePhones parents provide their children.  You think the kid walking down the street with the little Orwellian telescreen in his hand is reading Plato’s concepts of the good, the true, and the beautiful?

 

Back to the books, everyone.

 

-30-

The Objective Correlative of the Construction Trades - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Objective Correlative of the Construction Trades

 

A builder takes a vision of a surface

A vision of place, stability, and horizon

Connections between a bookcase and a window       

Smooth transitions from sitting room to bath

 

And pours them all out as concrete indeed

The Cat as an Argument Against the Concept of Evolution - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Cat as an Argument Against the Concept of Evolution

 

On the sixth day God made the animals

The cat generally disapproved of the others

And in a superior fashion licked its paws

In the springtime shade of the very first oak

 

The very first cat looked upon the very first bird

 

And ate it

 

                   And the cat said that the bird was good

Chewy in musculature and crunchy in bone

 

Then when the Creator rebuked the cat

The cat ignored Him

And in a superior fashion licked its paws

What WE Did in the War - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

What WE Did in the War

 

For all those Keyboard Commandos

Who Can Quote Every Line in Patton

 

You talk about what WE did in World War Two -

Well, I wasn’t there, and neither were you

A Row of Missals on the Chimneypiece - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Row of Missals on the Chimneypiece

 

Those inexpensive missals, all in a row

Upon the chimneypiece of their little home

Each with its ribbons in orderly place

Like children in line for the Eucharist

 

I envied my friend for his family’s faith

The daily liturgies of a Catholic home

Rhythms and usages giving order to life -

They are all gone now, dead or dispersed

 

And in a garage sale some fifty years on

I found his missal, ribbons still in place

The Unemployed Second-Amendment Carpenter Looking for Work - rhyming couplet

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Unemployed Second-Amendment Carpenter Looking for Work

 

“I have five ARs to support,” said he

Without the merest hint of irony

Jack and the Magic Cryptostalk - weekly column 4 December 2022

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46194@aol.com

 

Jack and the Magic Cryptostalk

 

As we are so often reminded in life, there are no magic beans. Still, the lesson is often not taken: The Dutch Tulip Bubble in the 17^th century, the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Bubble in the 18^th century, the original Ponzi scheme in 1919, fools’ gold, emus, Enron, Madoff, cryptocurrency, the Texas State Lottery [State lottery advertising tells players half of the story | AP News], Theranos, and any number of other get-poor-quick schemes that victimize people with cruel tricks to separate them from their savings.

 

We all read about these historical ripoffs in our history classes and wondered how anyone could be so naïve as to mortgage the house to buy, say, tulips, or maybe shares in a gold mine in Peru.

 

In the future people will read about cryptocurrencies and marvel even more. How is it that people invested in something that didn’t even exist? A machine or series of machines generate secret codes that have no reference to anything in reality, and some clever people then sell these secret codes for money. The idea is that the secret codes acquire value and can later be sold for a profit.

 

Magic beans indeed.

 

The first few code owners in any given scheme do make a profit; they tell their stories which in turn entice others to buy some of the magic beans – codes – and so the originators accrue fortunes which they filter to a foreign tax haven before discreetly disappearing with almost all of the investors’ money into another nation which for a generous fee will ignore any attempt at extradition.

 

The recent dramatic failure of a cryptocurrency [Crypto Stocks Teeter Near Abyss as Fink’s Warning Adds to Angst (yahoo.com)] and [Why Hasn’t Sam Bankman-Fried Been Arrested Yet? (nymag.com)] has let the metaphorical cat out of the bag with regard to the others.  The beanstalk is falling; the marvel is that it stood as long as it did.

 

The first few investors might or might not be required by an inquisitive federal court to give their winnings back, and while Poncy Clever, MBA, is lounging on a tropical beach (as long as a host government will want to put up with him), the thousands of investors will be left with nothing but self-reproach.

 

Poncy Clever, MBA, with an umbrella drink in his hand and a Rolex on his wrist, might paraphrase Marie Antoinette and say mockingly, “Let them eat fungible tokens.”

 

Or magic beans.

 

-30-

Trial by Twitter - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Trial by Twitter

 

“…why torture ourselves in order to hurt others?”

 

-Dag Hammarskjold, Markings

 

We have made ourselves a surveillance state

Eager to be approved

Fearful of being judged

We the accused must not presume to think

 

We impeach ourselves daily on their screens

(The screens are hardly ours)

Accusing ourselves of sin

Against the loving terror of the Now

 

But as for a torch and a Phrygian hat –

Is there an app for any of that?

Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers, and Pom-Poms - senryu

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Carpenters, Electricians, Plumbers, and Pom-Poms

 

And sometimes I hear

Professional craftsmen gossiping

Like cheerleader sponsors

Cats, Mice, and Inter-Species Violence - senryu

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Cats, Mice, and Inter-Species Violence

 

Inspired by Kirk Briggs’ thoughts on eye surgery

(It’s complicated)

 

I have cats and mice

The mice don’t need surgery 

But the cats insist

The Cataracts of the Nile - (yes, this one is awful...)

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Cataracts of the Nile

 

Obscure and opaque

But surely there are in Egypt

Ophthalmologists

Navigating the Rules - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Navigating the Rules

 

Everything not forbidden is compulsory

 

-T. H. White, The Book of Merlyn

 

The rules are immutable and absolute

Except when they’re not. The rules this week

Are whatever the powerful might say -

Questions are a burden; simply obey

 

Accept that whatever you think is wrong

To the truculent who disapprove of you

For you are outdated, a relic, a prat

And you are wicked to disagree with that

 

Anything in your defense that you might urge

Is now a forbidden ism subject to purge

Negotiating Toilet Paper - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Negotiating Toilet Paper

 

The escort carried three rolls of toilet paper

As she walked me to the classroom area

One each for Dorm A, Dorm B, and the guards

Some fellows walked casually along the path

 

“And you guys know how to walk single-file”

 

“Yes, ma’am”

 

“Yes, ma’am”

 

“Sure thing, ma’am”

 

And thus in silence they formed that single-file

 

“One roll of toilet paper per prisoner per week

Sometimes it’s just not enough,” she said

“We had a meeting on it; I told the guys

Sometimes administration just doesn’t get it”

 

Dignity, like treaties, can be broken

In many ways

The Eyes of a Stalker - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Eyes of a Stalker

 

Dear Publisher:

 

Yes, I thank God you are free to publish your books

And I thank that wise First Amendment thing

Even though crafted by agnostics and rebels

Who ought to have been faithful to their King

 

You are free to call that parasite a prince

You are free to profit from his treacheries

But selling your honor for shillings and pence

Reveals your failure as cultural trustees

 

But know you something of that sullen talker?

On the cover you have given him the eyes of a stalker