Dropping Stuff at Midnight for the Gregorian New Year - poem

 Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Dropping Stuff at Midnight for the Gregorian New Year

 

(The Julian calendar is so old that it’s a Boomer thing)

 

I don’t know why people drop things at midnight:

A ball of electric lights in New York

A single light bulb as a gag somewhere else

As The People chant in unison, “WOO! WOO!”

 

Maybe this year they’ll drop a flaming car

Its finely-crafted batteries on fire

Torching the holy QAnon tee-shirt stand

As foretold in the House of Representatives

 

(Yawn)

 

Couldn’t all of this wait until daylight?

I don’t know why people drop things at midnight

                                   picture of a burning tesla public domain - Search (bing.com)

Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution (I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution

(I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)

 

Be the cliché-sodden, inaccurate,

and unsourced quote you always wanted to be

On This Feast of St. Stephen - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

On This Feast of St. Stephen

 

If Good King Wenceslaus looked down today

He might well ask in irony if we

Have adequate food for these Twelve Days

With our leftover hams and yams and rolls

 

Coffee and tea, chocolates from Italy

Bread loaves so yeasty they incense the air

Potatoes and puddings and plates of cheese –

Our cry is, “I couldn’t eat another bite!”

 

So are the gifts we left on the Jesse Tree

For some poor man are all that they might be?

Do Vladimir Putin and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Do Vladimir Putin and His Office Staff Play Secret Santa?

 

Some speak of an after-Christmas letdown. And perhaps it is true that all the weeks of expectations and demands and sometimes forced merriment crash down into a silence on the 26^th. 

 

But Christmas truly begins at midnight on the 24^th of December and ends with the Feast of the Epiphany on the 6^th of January.  In the northern hemisphere our ancestors took those twelve winter days in feasting and celebration after the liturgies of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.  The first Monday after Epiphany was Plough / Plow Monday, beginning the new agricultural year with farmers breaking up and turning over the soil in anticipation of spring.

 

This year Christmas Day fell on Wednesday, so most Americans return to their metaphorical plows / ploughs dark and early on Thursday morning, but maybe while wearing a nice, new coat against the cold.

 

More practically, the car or pickup might be wearing a new battery which will crank the engine without the need for jumper cables.

 

Most decorations remain up until Epiphany, which is exactly right, honoring the Infant Jesus and serving as a counterpoint against the cold, dark weather. The letdown comes when, at last, the tree and decorative angels and wise men and Disney princesses and plastic ivy and the lights, all those wonderful little lights, must be taken down and packed away until next year.

 

After the floor is vacuumed of pine needles (real or made in China of weird chemicals) and the furniture re-arranged, the low, grey skies outside the window remind us that winter has settled in for a long visit.

 

If the house is blessed with children parents are advised to wear slippers upon arising in the mornings lest their bare feet fall upon Barbie’s scepter or Ken’s sports car.

 

Christmas toys once engaged children – girls played with their dolls (pardon me while I dodge hashtags of outrage), boys played with their cap pistols (eeeeeek!), and living room floors and front yards were adventure lands of cars, airplanes, push-scooters, books about Robin Hood and Gene Autry and space cadets and Annette and her adventures, dump trucks, Barbie’s Dream Missouri Pacific train set, trikes, bikes, wagons, footballs, basketballs, kickballs, little green army men, little plastic cowboys and Indians, games formed up and won and lost, and occasional tears.

 

Christmas toys now seem to be a matter of silent, earphoned Children of the Corn staring dully and obediently into little glowing screens. What are The Voices telling your children?

 

The season of Christmas, now mostly known as after-Christmas, is good in its own quiet ways – social demands are fewer, the house is quieter, there are hidden resources of chocolate to be explored, and a good cuppa and a book by the fire is possible, where we can also meditate on the eternal verities, such as whether bloody tyrants and their office staffs play Secret Santa.

 

Peace.

 

-30-

 

Within the Octave of Christmas - poem

 Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall46184@aol.comm

(from several years ago)

Within the Octave of Christmas

 

For Eldon, Patron of Christmas Bonfires

 

The wan, weak winter sun has long since set

And on the edge of stars a merry fire

Sends sparks to play among the tinseled frost

That decorates the fields for Christmas-time.

Within this holy octave, happy men

Concelebrate with hops, cigars, and jokes,

This liturgy of needful merriment.

 

Because

 

The Holy Child is safe in Mary’s arms,

Saint Joseph leans upon his staff and smiles,

The shepherds now have gone to watch their sheep,

And all are safe from Herod for a time.

 

Our Christmas duty now is to delight

In Him who gives us joy this happy night.

For Our Mothers on Christmas Eve - poem

(ca 2015)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall46184@aol.com

For our Mothers on Christmas Eve

 

Beyond all other nights, on this strange Night,

A strangers’ Star, a silent, seeking Star,

Helps set the wreckage of our souls aright:

It leads us to a stable door ajar                                                         

 

And we are not alone in peeking in:

An ox, an ass, a lamb, some shepherds, too -

Bright Star without; a brighter Light within

We children see the Truth three Wise Men knew

 

For we are children there in Bethlehem

Soft-shivering in that winter long ago

We watch and listen there, in star-light dim,

In cold Judea, in a soft, soft snow

 

The Stable and the Star, yes, we believe:

Our mothers sing us there each Christmas Eve

The Stable is Wherever You Are on Christmas - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

In the Stable on Christmas Eve

 

For Tod and Max

 

My friend prays at the Stable each Christmas Eve

In statio at St. Michael’s, waiting for the Light

(But indolent half-pagan that I am

I want an early bed on any night)

 

This year the Stable must be a room at home

A candle, a creche, a plastic ox and lamb

A very real dog who might speak at midnight

And coffee and quiet remembrances with Max

 

Wherever we must wait for Jesus to be born

There is the Stable, and then the happiest morn

 

The Rural Electric Co-Op's Giant Christmas Tree

 (from 2020)

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

The Rural Electric Co-Op’s Giant Christmas Tree

Christmas trees are a delight to a child, and when a man is old and can be a child again, even more delightful.

Our family’s farm was about three miles from town. We lived in what would now be called situational poverty, but most folks in the county were worse off. Some kids got bicycles for Christmas, for us it was socks and cap pistols and little tinplate toy trucks, and for many there was almost nothing. The post-war prosperity boom bypassed most of East Texas.

A few weeks before Christmas each year Father took us boys into the woods next to our land for the adventure of cutting the Christmas tree. In our informal squirrel hunts in the autumn we had scouted out likely trees, and now returned for the best of them, almost always a pine.  Finding it, cutting it down with the hatchet, and dragging it back to the house through the chill was a great adventure to be savored then and savored now in the remembrance.

Father stood the tree in a bucket of wet sand and anchored it with fishing line. He and Mother strung the big Noma™ lights and hung the precious glass ornaments, and then we children were at last given a box of tinsel each and permitted to fling the bright strands any way we wanted. What a mess! I realize now that after we went to bed Mother discreetly arranged the tinsel a little more artistically.

Farms in our school readers and in the movies were always bright and cheerful places, with happy cows and happy pigs living peaceful lives of prelapsarian fellowship. In reality a farm, especially in the winter, is brown and grey and mucky and smelly, and after their years of loyal service cows are prodded into a trailer, bellowing in fear, to be driven away to the slaughterhouse. Good ol’ Bessie, whom you raised from a calf, is now lunch.

Life on a farm is often grim.

Thus, a little pine strung with multi-colored lights and little figures and globes brought out once a year was magic.

Another magic Christmas tree was the huge one the local electric co-op built each year by stringing lights on their tall radio mast – tall enough to have red lights all year round lest the town doctor fly his airplane into it.

For weeks the far-away tree shone across the dark, frosty fields. A child imagined it to be a magic place, maybe even the North Pole itself.

Now the tower is gone, replaced by cell ‘phones and more modern radios, and the co-op decorates only a little tree out in front of the drive-by window. Still, it’s a Christmas tree, and good enough.

For Christmas the co-op gives employees, retirees, trustees, and others ham for Christmas. Because I serve on the scholarship committee I get a ham, which is not a Christmas tree but then you can’t eat a Christmas tree.

Scholarships for graduating seniors, Christmas hams for some, electricity for all, a giving opportunity for helping with the bills of the poor, and a pretty good Christmas tree out front. What a wonderful institution our Rural Electric Co-Op is!

-30-

Toy Trains, Grandmother's Good China, and Children - Christmas

 (From 2019)

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Toy Trains, Grandmother’s Good China, and Children

As Inspector Barnaby says in one of the Midsomer Mysteries, we can’t recover the past; that’s why it’s the past.

Childhood Christmases are often the metaphorical benchmark for our present Christmases, and that won’t do. The magic of opening a package under the tree on Christmas morning is for little children; it won’t work for us and it’s not meant to. And that’s okay. Besides, at some point in all the visiting we’re going to be privileged to watch children open their presents, and we’ll get to share a little of their magic, like a puff of pixie dust.

In the run-up to Christmas there was for over a century a little commercial magic in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, but that disappeared long ago and after this Christmas the few remaining Sears stores are going away too. Where, then, can little boys go to see the magic of toy trains running on multiple levels through a cotton-wool winter landscape? Where did they go, the tiny little people forever waiting at a rural railway station and the others walking, sawing wood, sitting by a window? Where are all the little houses and stores and barns lit by miniature grain-of-wheat light bulbs?

Young adults don’t remember walking and shopping along streets lined with shops, and their children won’t remember shopping malls.

Ordering by electrical mail is certainly efficient, but you can’t fit Santa Claus or a junior high choir into a UPS truck.

Artificial Christmas trees – bah, humbug!

One good thing about a modern Christmas is that no one seems to stage Charles Dickens’ tedious A Christmas Carol much anymore. When I was a child I always hoped someone would kick Tiny Tim’s little crutch out from under him. And maybe someone did.

I wonder when someone first said, “Christmas has become too commercialized!” Probably about 34 or 35 A.D.

How remarkable that the appearance on the dinner table of Meemaw’s “good” china, probably from Sears or Montgomery Ward, brought out only twice a year, can bring back all sorts of those childhood memories I just now cautioned you against.

On Sunday morning after Mass the teenagers assembled the Stable, and then some little children knelt before it to arrange the hay just so, and then place almost every figure – the Infant Jesus is brought on Christmas Eve – just so: Mary, Joseph, the crib, camels, oxen, shepherds, wise men first in this place and then in that, talking to each one of them about how when Christmas comes they must keep the Baby Jesus warm.

Magic.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

 

-30-

 

Christmas Without a Tree? - very short poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Christmas Without a Tree?

 

Not minding my own business I urged a tree

Yes, their children are gone

Yes, their children are grown

But the Christ-Child

                                  is here

And This the Happy Morn

  (from 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-

 

Mr. Krueger's Christmas

 (from 2019)

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Mr. Krueger’s Christmas

A friend referred y’r ‘umble scrivener to a James Stewart film until now unknown to him, Mr. Krueger’s Christmas, a gift of the Mormons in 1980.  Although the little movie is only 25 minutes long, it is a joy, a gift indeed.

Set in a vaguely 1950’s that perhaps never was, the story is about Willy Krueger, an elderly widower who is the custodian of an apartment building. As with the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks in the fields, Mr. Krueger’s work is humble and not much appreciated: immediately after he has swept the lobby clean for the night a tenant comes through to the elevators dragging a large Christmas tree that drops debris all over the floor.

Yeah, Merry Christmas, Mr. Krueger.

After his work is done Mr. Krueger settles in with his cat George (an allusion to It’s a Wonderful Life) to keep Christmas alone.  He sets a record album of Mormon Tabernacle Choir Christmas music on the hi-fi.

And then, like Scrooge, he begins having dreams; unlike Scrooge, Mr. Krueger’s dreams are happy ones.

He finds himself, in his shabby old clothes, directing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and it is great fun for all, especially the choir themselves.

In another scene Mr. Krueger imagines himself in a fashionable gentlemen’s clothier being fitted for the kind of suit he could never afford for real.

And in yet another scene he follows carolers through the snowy streets, which includes a lovely set piece complete with dancers.

The carolers are real, though, and he retrieves the mittens a little girl has lost.  When mother and daughter later come for the mittens, the little girl, Clarissa (an echo of Tchaikovsky’s Clara?), says to Mr. Krueger, “You hung them on the Christmas tree?”

Mr. Krueger replies, “Well, you remind me of everything good about Christmas so I just couldn't think of a better place…here you are.” 

The most moving scene is when Mr. Krueger finds himself in the Stable – yes, that Stable – on the first Christmas.  Of all the beings, humans and angels and animals, the only one aware of his presence is the Infant Jesus.

Mr. Krueger approaches the Child in awe and with slow steps, and hesitantly begins to speak. Mr. Krueger, through James Stewart one of the best monologues he ever filmed, thanks Jesus. Although Mr. Krueger is widowed and alone, and lives in a small basement apartment that comes with his cleaning job, he is grateful to God for everything: “As long as I can remember You've been right by my side.”

And the Child smiles at him.

Mr. Kreuger awakens back in the apartment, George the cat meows, and Mr. Krueger says, “Yeah, I guess you're right George; we better trim that tree. If we don't hurry, we'll be too late!”

The narrator concludes the film with: “‘I love you.’ That's what Christmas is all about... Clarissa said it to Mr. Krueger; Mr. Krueger said it to Jesus; and Jesus in so many ways said it to all of us.”

-30-

 

Applying for a Job at the Grocery Store - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Applying for a Job at the Grocery Store

 

A scruffy young man at a table slouched

His scruffy baseball cap encircled his head

A crown of defeat to match his scruffy tee

As he drew his letters with a borrowed pen

 

(He picked his nose and wiped it on his sleeve)

 

Maybe his momma told him to get a job

Instead of lying around the house all day

Bumming her cigarettes and watching TV

When what he wanted to do was follow his dreams

 

(His fashionable sneaks were both untied – so cool!)

 

Which is what they told him at graduation:

Go forth and follow your dreams; the world is yours

 

(But it wasn't)

People Who are Late for Mass Apologize to Me! - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

People Who are Late for Mass Apologize to Me

 

“I pray you, remember the porter”

 

-Macbeth II.iii.23-24

 

Like Macbeth’s poor porter I am a doorman too

An ‘umble man with a minimal set of skills

“’Tis my limited service” happily to meet

And greet the faithful while opening the door

 

When the server rings the bell, latecomers rush

Some glance at me guiltily and apologize

For being late to the divine liturgy –

Am I an attendance officer for God?

 

After the Order of the Porter I am a doorman

And will judge the timeliness of no man!

Read Within Your Academic Discipline - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Read Within Your Academic Discipline

 

 

The Child is father of the Man

 

-Wordsworth

 

 

When I was a child I read without discipline:

Robert A. Heinlein, Robin Hood, cowboy yarns

Pirates raiding across the Spanish Main

Penrod and Sam, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn

 

In college they said, “Read within your discipline”

The Russians are good, Romantics if you must

Though the English are overstudied and overdone

(Some say electronics are the coming thing)

 

I minded the words of my college tutor

‘Til Robin Hood stole the Sheriff’s computer

Twenty Three But Not Me - doggerel re 23andMe

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Twenty Three But Not Me

 

I am told I have 26 new kin

How sad that I will never get to meet them

23andMe has tossed me into the bin

Access has been blocked through someone’s whim:

 

My information is open for hackers to see

But it’s certainly not open for me!

 (Apparently 23andMe has lost information to hackers; the company’s solution is to punish the customer.)

The 23andMe Data Breach Keeps Spiraling | WIRED

Top 201 23andMe Reviews (consumeraffairs.com)

23andMe, Inc. | Complaints | Better Business Bureau® Profile (bbb.org)

23andMe Moves to Thwart Class-Action Lawsuits by Quietly Updating Terms | PCMag

23andMe frantically changed its terms of service to prevent hacked customers from suing (engadget.com)

23andMe Is Terrifying, but Not for the Reasons the FDA Thinks | Scientific American

A Fragment of Machinery in the Road - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Fragment of Machinery in the Road

 

Part of a specialty clamp in asphalt trapped

Like a primeval animal, jaws apart

A mechanical protest locked in place

When steaming pitch was rolled upon the road

 

The seasons pass and footsteps pass, leaves fall

But nothing changes for those frozen in place

By the decrees of stasis and stagnancy

Progress blocked by torpidity and time

 

The seasons pass, my daily footsteps pass

A fragment of machinery in the road

Two Verses in the Eternal Hymn - a poem for two young musicians at Christmas

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Two Verses in the Eternal Hymn

 

For Cate and Jack

Christmas 2023

 

From the foot of the Throne

 

A river flows out into all that is

And with it your music across the universe

To sing the happy beginnings of all things

To celebrate the holiness of being

 

Past

 

Dragons and dreams, the Mysteries of Joy

Galaxies of stars, the Mysteries of Light

An abyss of pain, the Mysteries of Sorrow

Eternal dawn, the Mysteries of Glory

 

Your music spirals and spins among the spheres

Among the orbits and spheres and great mysteries

Great mysteries of beings and things never seen

Your voices join with the songs of Creation

 

Your music slips into our atmosphere

To sing and ring among the rocks and rills

Voices of love singing joy and truth

Your gifts of beauty to humanity

 

You and your sweet voices, rare gifts of love

From the Throne of God to us on earth

And back again, music as light as dreams

And deeper than thunder from Olympus

 

Old Vainamoinen sings at dawn with you

Euterpe, Terpsichore, and Erato are your kin

Apollo tunes his lyre to you, and Pan his pipes

And Cecelia blesses all your works:

 

Hymns, descants, and carols, merry marches for the road

Bubble-gum tunes for the car radio

Sea shanties for work, and nonsense rhymes for fun

You pray them, play them, craft them all into place

 

Your music is a sacred offering to God

You sing it out into the universe

Where every note is an ornament forever

And you are two verses in the eternal Hymn

How to Review a War Movie Without Saying Anything - poem (of a sort)

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

How to Review a War Movie Without Saying Anything

 

First, copy out the same old filler words

You’ve read in almost every film review:

 

 

Glued to your seat edge of your seat action-packed

All-star cast powerful and moving iconic

Must-see intense cult classic gripping scenes

Gritty realism classic cinema

 

Haunting intense unforgettable thrilling

Sweeping raw emotion (as opposed to

Cooked emotion) unflinching essential

Stark visuals overwhelming odds intense

 

Stunning cinematography powerful

Unflinching acclaimed devastating action-adventure

Action-thriller infiltrate timeless story

Treacherous powerful performances

 

 

Then stir the words into a metaphorical soup

And let them crawl weakly across the screen

And die

Something That Will Stick to Your Ribs - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Something That Will Stick to Your Ribs

 

When I was a boy I was told to eat balanced meals

“Something that’ll stick to your ribs,” they said

But I didn’t want anything sticking to my ribs

I still don’t

An Envelope is its Own Story - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

An Envelope is its Own Story

 

An envelope in the post office parking lot

A woman parks next to it, looks down, and sneers

And puffs and heaves her ponderousness inside

To dock at the counter and make demands

 

I rescue the envelope and note the name and address

Oh, yes. I remember. That was all so sad

At least the daughter’s in the Army and safe enough

It’s a Christmas card. The man must have dropped it

 

I leave it at the counter, explaining the circs

The postal clerk accepts it back, and sneers

A Burning Bush That Wasn't - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Burning Bush That Wasn’t

 

“Vadam, et videbo visionem hanc magnum, quare non comburatur rubus”

 

-Exodus III

 

I was not herding Jethro’s flocks on Horeb

But merely walking for pleasure along the road

And like Moses I saw a burning light

And turned aside to see what it might be

 

There with my stick I pushed aside a bush

And beheld, sparkling in the morning sun

Flung into place by some man’s mighty arm

And not decayed or dimmed by weather or time

 

A beer can

Decolonize This Place - a perhaps intemperate screed

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Decolonize This Place

 

“Colony” is a value-neutral expression but this useful denotation has been force-fitted with a negative connotation which serves no purpose except the shallowest sort of propaganda.

 

Hong Kong, for instance, was until this century a British Crown Colony in which freedom of speech, movement, and economic activity were guaranteed. Now it is part of Communist China in which the only thing guaranteed is brutal oppression.

 

The label is not important; the reality of freedom is. We are a republic, but then so are North Korea, Haiti, and Viet-Nam. Canada, God’s second-favorite nation, is a dominion within the British Commonwealth, and they seem to get on just fine.

 

Still, facts are not allowed to influence the lemmings who chant slogans that begin with that intellectual thesis statement, “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho!”

 

A ‘way cool thing now is to claim that everything and every concept is colonized and now must be decolonized in order to be restored to some sort of pre-lapsarian golden age that never was. “Decolonize this place” is now extended to art, music, literature, and for all we know beagles and flashlight batteries.

 

Well, I propose a decolonization of this nation. We have a national flag. The red, white, green, and black of the mythological state of Palestine isn’t it.

 

Decolonize this place.

 

When we see thousands of idle, uninformed, and apparently unemployable oafs marching and menacing in this country’s streets under a polluted sea of Palestinian flags we are reminded of the Ku Klux Klanner-bananers and the Nazi-nasties who in the 1920s and 1930s strutted and bellowed in our streets waving their hateful rags, shouting their hateful ideologies, and demanding our submission. A lot of Americans bought into that doo-doo too.

 

Why do we now see more Palestinian – which is in effect a camouflage for Hamas – flags in our streets than our own?

 

How is it that so many people now regard our republic as a colony of Hamas, and demand that we colonials obey the dictates of a foreign power that hates all of us?

 

Decolonize this place. Not with violence or those stupid bullhorns, but with a quiet, stern refusal to indulge Hamas. Don’t accept any arguments about a false equivalence. There is no equivalence between an ideology of genocide,, murder, hostage-taking, lying as an art form, torture, and a one-world empire [Hamas’s Genocidal Intentions Were Never a Secret - The Atlantic], and our concepts of dignity and equality (though we could be better at living those concepts).

 

Decolonize this place.

 

-30-

In Violation of Community Standards - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

In Violation of Community Standards

 

For Writing a Positive Review

 

 

“Unmutual!”

 

-Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, “A Change of Mind”

 

 

Amazon.god judged me, and found me wanting

For violating Community Standards

I don’t know what amazon.sin I committed

In praising my new Sperry Topsiders

 

Let us make such violations worthy of praise

We will not be communed against our will

Or judged by amazon.inquisition

Or any other corporate dotheads

 

I will never take an amazon.loyaltyoath

But new shoes are nice

Puppies Share Christmas in Their Own Special Way - rhyming DOGgerel

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Puppies Share Christmas in Their Own Special Way

 

Nothing says Christmas like sparkly glitter

Frosting the ornaments and, oh! So much more

Tiny stars shared from an incontinent critter -

In diarrheal doggy poop on the bedroom floor!

Henry Kissinger Has Left His Multi-Million-Dollar Apartment - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Henry Kissinger Has Left His Multi-Million-Dollar Apartment

 I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

 

-C. S. Lewis, Preface to The Screwtape Letters

The bodyguards, the security details

The long black cars, the cooing movie stars

The expensive dinner jackets tailored just so

The best cigars, the rarest of champagnes

The jeweled watches and those golden cufflinks

The many underlings awaiting his call

The fawning bishops at the Al Smith dinners

The publishers eager to print his latest screeds

The voice that commanded armies and fleets

And left presidents quivering in fear

 

The millions of corpses rotting in the sun

A Connoisseur of Clinic Waiting Rooms - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Connoisseur of Clinic Waiting Rooms

 

I could regale you with tales of puppy dogs

Painted with matching little argyll vests

And Kodachrome sunsets snapped long ago

Darkness and dust settling on a fading lake

 

I could detail for you leatherette chairs

In rows beneath the television on the wall

Facing old women shrieking in HD

And years-old magazines that no one reads

 

A door opens to a whiff of germicide

My name is called – and there’s no place to hide!

Romance of the Boeing 707 - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Romance of the Boeing 707

 

Out on Runway Number 9

Big 707 set to go

 

-Gordon Lightfoot

 

Old Ginsberg wrote that the typewriter was holy

An airport of words for coming and going

On a runway of ribbon, platen, and keys

McKuen might have said it’s a safe place to land

 

But then came the Boeing 707

Dear Gordon Lightfoot’s silver wings on high

It flew our words and us all over the world

And became for us holy in its own way

 

The 707 – there was nothing finer

But the last one I saw was a roadside diner

HAMAS Appears to Have Taken Control of Our Nation

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

HAMAS Appears to Have Taken Control of Our Nation

 

Video showed a Palestinian flag raised on the statue of the Marquis de Lafayette near the White House, with "Free Palestine" spray painted on his pedestal. A Palestinian keffiyeh, popularized by the Palestinian Liberation Organization, was put on the head of one of the figures at the foot of the pedestal.

 

-Brady Knox, Washington Examiner

 

Columbia University Closes Campus Ahead of Israel-Hamas War Protests - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

Pro-Palestinian protesters shut down main entrance to Union Station in Washington, D.C. | Watch (msn.com)

 

The people say: ‘Shut it down for Palestine’ – International Action Center (iacenter.org)

 

NYPD beefing up patrols as Jewish schools worry over ‘day of Jihad’ (nypost.com)

 

Hamas’ Terror Also Holds a Warning for the US - The Washington Post

 

California Democratic convention in Sacramento shut down by cease-fire protest disruptions (msn.com)

 

Bad Medicine - Tablet Magazine

 

A Snapshot of Support for Palestinians Across America - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

 

Pro-Palestine protesters shut down Bay Bridge (ktvu.com)

 

Protest blocks Israeli cargo ship at Port of Oakland in support for Palestinians amid violence in Gaza - ABC7 San Francisco (abc7news.com)

 

Pro-Palestine protesters shut down OSU trustees meeting, demand divestment from Israel (msn.com)

 

SHUT IT DOWN Nov 9th Day of Rage: Terror-Tied Islamic and Leftist Destroyers Terrorize Communities, Target Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics - Geller Report

 

Pro-Palestinian group posts NYC map with locations, sparks fears of attacks (msn.com)

 

Chants ‘calling for the murder of Jews’ were shouted at me during Cooper Union protest, student recalls (foxnews.com)

 

Full List of Democrats Who Refused To Condemn Hamas Supporters (newsweek.com)

 

Pro-Palestinian protesters drag burning Israeli flag down NYC street as they warn supporters days are 'numbered' (nypost.com)

 

Jewish NYC high schoolers verbally attacked by woman on DC train after National Mall rally: ‘F–k all you guys’ (msn.com)

 

Jewish teacher hides in Queens high school as students riot (nypost.com)

 

Cornell student accused of threatening to kill Jewish students will remain behind bars | CNN

 

Israeli business owner in Florida speaks after several Jewish establishments tagged with antisemitic graffiti (fox35orlando.com)

 

Antisemitic incidents on college campuses spur federal investigation (usatoday.com)

 

Jewish communities threatened by acts of antisemitic vandalism across the US. | CNN

 

Campus Reform the #1 Source for College News

 

Pro-Palestinian Protesters Occupy New York Times Lobby In Demonstration – Deadline

 

Grand Central Terminal shut down due to pro-Palestinian protests (nydailynews.com)

 

7K pro-Palestinian protesters take over Brooklyn Bridge, call for elimination of Jewish state: 'By any means' (nypost.com)

 

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade arrests: 34 people arrested after pro-Palestinian demonstrators interrupted parade, NYPD says | CNN

 

Pro-Palestinian protestors block Port of Tacoma military ship | Crosscut

 

https://www.bing.com/search?q=palestinian+disruptions+of+america&qs=n&sp=-1&lq=0&pq=palestinian+disruptions+of+amer&sc=11-31&sk=&cvid=A41FE5C2F4374955B9BA0D1649506991&ghsh=0&ghacc=0&ghpl=&FPIG=24A5D720EB0C48F18D38923D216D8256&first=11&FORM=PERE

 

Pro-Palestinian Protesters Shut Down 3rd & Fairfax, March Through The Grove – Deadline

 

Hamas terror organization charter targets Christians and US service organizations (msn.com)

 

Hamas Ally CAIR Has Been Operating With Impunity Inside America for 30 Years | | news-journal.com

 

Pro-Palestinian protesters rally on Mag Mile to draw attention to Israel-Hamas war - Chicago Sun-Times (suntimes.com)

 

‘Bombs are dropping, why are you shopping?’ Black Friday traditions interrupted by anti-Israel protests (bizpacreview.com)

 

Hamas’s Genocidal Intentions Were Never a Secret - The Atlantic

 

-30-

 

 

November 2023 Update Made a Mess of my Apple Watch - Caution

 On the morning of 25 November I downloaded the latest Apple security update. I don't know about security, but the update made a mess of my settings without asking me if I wanted anything changed. Further, despite all the directions from Apple and other sources, I cannot change the settings back and I cannot delete the update. 

When this, my first and last Apple Watch, fades away I'm going to crush it into its components and retrieve my decades-old $10 Wal-Mart Timex from a desk drawer where it still ticks.

Like Children Dancing - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Like Children Dancing

 

Like children dancing, leaves form up in rows

Then skitter across each corner and street

As shoals in rolling ranks overflowing other ranks

Or little tornadoes laughing through circles and swirls

 

Like children celebrating their youth and strength

Leaves tumble and run before the shifting wind

‘Way up into the air and back to earth

In happy games of catch-me-if-you-can

 

Like children in the afternoon, just out of school

Autumn leaves joyfully mock every rule

The First Folio of...You! - mere rhyming doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The First Folio of You

 

On the 400^th anniversary of the First Folio

Of some playwright or other in England

 

I fear that there will never, ever be

A First Folio of the works of – Me!

Bound in leather most luxuriously

For sale at a wildly exorbitant fee

 

Scanned for pleasure over cups of tea

And studied by academics thoughtfully

Beloved by the climbing bourgeoise

As much as by the high nobility

 

I can’t adorn my poems with a PhD

So will kind readers accept a high school degree?

Thanksgiving as a Singleton - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Thanksgiving as a Singleton

 

Memories of a drive-through just won’t do

Set something on your table, if only for you

A turkey plate from the grocery store

Two side dishes from cans, or maybe more

And gravy even if it’s a store-bought broth

Silverware, real plates, and a tablecloth

Wash your hands, light a candle, say a prayer

And open your napkin with your special flair!

 

You are where you are meant to be, it’s true

And know that God is with you to see you through

First, Catch Your Cookbook

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

First, Catch Your Cookbook

 

Christmas was close at hand, in all his bluff and hearty honesty; it was the season of hospitality, merriment, and open-heartedness…

 

-Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers

 

Having never seen a copy of Mrs. Beeton’s famous cookery book I don’t know if her recipe for rabbit begins with “First, catch your rabbit.” If it isn’t true it ought to be, for it is fine example of both English logic (rare) and English whimsy (a defining trait). The expression is often used as a cautionary warning, similar to our American “Don’t count your chickens until they’re hatched.”

 

The arc from Thanksgiving to Christmas is when the thoughtful cook will seek out MeeMaw’s cookbook to verify seasonal specialties: Waldorf salad, corn casserole, turkey fried or baked or broiled, ham fried or baked or boiled, and those old traditional dishes special to each family.

 

Cookbooks are otherwise seldom consulted in our electrical times, for the cook can quickly seek out a recipe on the Orwellian telescreen / Tolkien Palantir. However, opening an old family cookbook in anticipation of the holidays is a way of inviting all the ancestors back home for a moment in time. The crumbling pages are the ones that the cook’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother read, maybe by the light of a coal-oil lamp on a dark winter day long ago.

 

On the margins are many penciled notes and corrections. You can almost hear some ancestor muttering, “Harrumph! What does that editor in New York know about real cornbread!”

 

A slip of paper falls out – in Mama’s elegant penmanship is a recipe she copied out from her own mother’s telling. Another piece of paper might be a yellowing clipping from a newspaper, a rationing recipe with a scrap of war news on the other side.

 

Older cookbooks might be bound in leather, like a Bible, and the connections are real, for both allude to bread and life and stories. The pages of both books are pages of the histories of families. In them you can, for a moment, be a little child again, barely as high as the stove stop, helping (not very well!) your grandmother with baking your favorite cookies. Do you remember? Do you see and smell the joys of her warm kitchen again? Is Grandpa still sitting at the table rustling the pages of The Houston Post and muttering about the prices of cattle feed?

 

Some of the best memories are in that old family cookbook. With Thanksgiving and Christmas coming soon, it’s time to refresh them. This is a season when memories of a drive-through just won’t do.

 

-30-

 

Decaying Orbits - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Decaying Orbits

 

Wild vultures swirl in distant elegance

Circling gracefully in the high, cold blue

Wings beating the downdrafts into place and space

Then orbiting down, a narrowing decay

 

And landing lumpishly upon the dead

Their distant grace was but foul deceit

Up close they know only vomit and filth

Their orbits have decayed into decay

 

Perhaps at a distance we seem beautiful

But would we want to know ourselves up close?

A Good Enough Leaf-Time - photograph and poem

 

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us.  We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words.  We can make a little form, and we gain composure.

                                                               -Robert Frost

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Good Enough Leaf-Time

 

No more the withered summer-browns of death

Crumbling and sere upon the dry and crackling ground

Beneath a Rime of the Ancient Mariner sky -

Leaves in autumn colours are falling now

 

Pale greens, poor yellows, weak reds, but good enough

To decorate this time of early frosts

With appropriate merriment, good enough

To rake into playtime heaps for children and dogs

 

These modest scenes will attract no peepers this year

But I will send you a snap – it’s good enough!