Jim Croce and a Rainy Morning - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Jim Croce and a Rainy Morning

 

When the plane went down that was the end

Of telephone operators and bottles of time

But the electronics are kind enough to send

Good memories of when coffee was a dime

 

You really could mess around with Jim

If you knew your way around a chord

And heard his lyrics as a workman’s hymn

That spoke of art offered to the Lord

 

He gave us good thoughts through his guitar’s strum -

And, yeah, a wild moustache to back away from!

Forming a Committee Around a Car That Wouldn't Start - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Forming a Committee Around a Car That Wouldn’t Start

 

The engine wouldn’t turn over; the electrics were dead

We stood around the open hood, each scratching his head

 

1^st Member:

 

“It appears to me it’s the dead battery

There’s no indication of a charge, you see”

 

2^nd Member:

 

“I’m a college graduate, so I am smarter

Obviously the problem is with the starter”

 

3rd Member:

 

“There’s a smell in the engine, something tannic

And I should know; I’m a certified mechanic”

 

4^th Member:

 

“I’m a knight of the road; I drive a freighter

Just let me at that broken alternator”

 

 

But none of our skilled efforts came to pass

Because no one had bothered to check

 

                        the gas

The Bright Green Wheelie-Bin - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Bright Green Wheelie-Bin

 

(Much Superior to a Red Wheelbarrow)

 

The wheelie-bin is pretty in its own way

Thick plastic moulded in ecological green

To be rumbly-dragged on garbage day

To the end of lane to grace our suburban scene

 

Very little depends upon the wheelie-bin:

Unpleasant household garbage on its rounds

The really useful stuff has been well dug in

The loam – potato peels and coffee grounds

 

But note ye well - this garden plot thickens

For we have sparrows and crows

but no white chickens

No More Pronouns, Then? DEI, Mr. Trump, and Mr. Shakespeare

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

No More Pronouns, Then?

 

 

A version of Henry V, that, yea, verily, will offend neither the rightistas nor the leftistas

 

 

Few, happy few, band of brothers;
For to-day that sheds blood with
Shall be brother; be ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think accursed were not here,
And hold manhoods cheap while speaks
That fought with upon Saint Crispin’s day

 

Or better yet:

 

Few, happy few, band of siblings;
For to-day that contributes bodily fluid with
Shall be sibling; be ne’er so vile,
This day shall equalise even more equally an existing state of equality:
And persons in a subset of the United Rulerdom now a-bed
Shall think mildly disapproved were not here,
And hold personhoods cheap and so in need of therapy while speaks
That negotiated with upon the 25^th of October

Do Dreams Fade Away at Dawn? Or Do We? - short poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Do Dreams Fade Away at Dawn? Or Do We?

 

Do dreams beyond the dreamer dream

The imagined lands from deepest night

In which we live and seem to love -

Do they exist at morning’s light?

It Became Necessary to Destroy the Constitution to Save It - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

It Became Necessary to Destroy the Constitution to Save It

 

-as an unnamed army major in Viet-Nam did not say

 

 

When old Rip Van Me wakes up each morning he finds

A world unlike the one when his nap began -

Who are these angry faces on great screens?

Why are there cracks in the Capitol dome?

 

Arrests and deportations, mobs with clench’ed fists

Grim armored vehicles patrolling our city streets

A presidential advisor hurling Nazi salutes

Personal loyalty checks within our surveillance state

 

When old Rip Van Me wakes up each morning he finds

A nation of madmen who have lost their minds

Flight 5342 - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Happy Young Lives Rich with Promise

 

“I will go in to the Altar of God”

 

Ephemera among the searchlight beams:

A paperback novel, a Mickey Mouse doll

Purses and ‘phones, and in-flight magazines

Briefcases still securing important work

 

Ephemera among the searchlight beams:

A note about souvenirs for the kids back home

From the Folger and the aerospace museum

Ice skates in the bins, safely stowed away

 

But now

 

Now lost to us among the searchlight beams:

Happy young lives rich with promises and dreams

Cancelling the InterGossip Service - not exactly a poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Cancelling the InterGossip Service

 

And how are you today I am so very glad to hear that thank you sir you have paid today so we won’t be able to cancel the service until next month I am so glad to hear that we need a mailing address so that we can send you a box for the equipment thank you sir no a post office box won’t do I am sorry sir you are breaking up yes sir let me read that back to you thank you sir let me verify your account number that is correct and thank you I will need your zip code will you repeat that thank you but our records show that your service address is oh that is not it please tell me again thank you sir I will read it back to you thank you sir you will have thirty days from the twenty-seventh of next month to return the equipment in the box we will provide to you at your mailing address and I have that mailing address so thank you sir if you will wait two minutes while I access your file thank you sir and I will need your mailing address oh I see I have that sir for the equipment return thank you sir which will cost you $350 if it is not returned thank you sir and now I must read you this list now if you have any questions if you will please wait two minutes thank you sir and may I ask why you are discontinuing service and are you moving sir if you will wait two minutes while I update your records thank you sir and I have your mailing address and may I ask why you are discontinuing service with us oh I am so sorry sir but did they tell you it is fibre optic I understand sir before we go I want to advise you that because you are a long-time customer we have a special offer thank you sir I am happy to have helped you sir and I hope you have a good rest of the day

Guarding Borders Against Criminals - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Guarding Borders Against Criminals

 

 

In any case we are not attacking them at all. We are offering them incalculable benefits.

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

 

 

They began settling here a long time ago

At first they were welcome, but they developed a ‘tude

We need their charity - they tell us so!

But their intentions are obvious and crude

 

With insolence, edict, and a heavy political hand

They’ve come to save us from ourselves; that’s what they say

Here in our beloved Canada, our home and native land –

Oh, won’t the Americans just go away!

A Corporal Who Would Never Be a Sergeant - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Corporal Who Would Never Be a Sergeant

 

He was a corporal who would never be a sergeant

In a Palmach squad that would never be recognized

By the Palmach or by the Haganah.

He was a rabbi of the rocks and rubble and roads

 

He would never be recognized as a rabbi

He loved a curly-haired girl who would never marry him

And was friends with a little feral dog

Who crept out to him from behind the ruins

 

There was blood that called to him from Poland

In Yiddish and Hebrew; he didn’t remember why

He was a luftmensch, but dependable in his way

A littleness never admitted to staff meetings

 

He did what he was told to do, and then ignored

He delivered messages and curious packages

To obscure points forbidden to him and his kind

And the dog was shot dead for someone’s sport

 

With an old British rifle he cleared strongpoints

So that the officers could add to their resumes’

And he was told by the cooks that he was too late

As they laughed and closed the door on him

 

Confusion and smoke, and fighting in the streets

Burning corpses and armored cars, wild screams

There was little of him after the RPG hit

And children scurried out to mutilate and steal

 

He was posted as missing, possibly a deserter

Late January is a Time of Grey - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Late January is a Time of Grey

 

I read a little in Billy Collins just now

Because Tolkien is in the other room

Along with the laundry and an unmade bed

Late January is a time of grey

 

I just want to sit with my coffee awhile

And then I’ll stow the laundry and make the bed

The dishwasher can remain silent until tomorrow

Late January is a time of grey

 

I was nibbled to death by ducks today

Because

Late January is a time of grey

Third Sunday in Extraordinary Time - very short

 Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Third Sunday in Extraordinary Time

 

Dear friends in Christ,

 

The divine liturgy will be delayed for a few minutes

While the new regime checks everyone’s papers

Tiny Artists of the Night - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Tiny Artists of the Night

 

Snowflakes by flashlight in the deepening dark

I left them to their night of proper tasks

They beamed down to the earth all over the park

And for the cold grey dawn they’ve made great masks

 

Plateaus of iridescent white to layer the lawn

Transcendent beauty in a transient medium

Still falling against the feeble all-day dawn

Little artists who form great truths from tedium

 

And then mysteriously they fly away

To shape the existentials some other day

The Dignity of the Office - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Dignity of the Office

 

Whatever the incoming president fancies

(One hopes to speak without fear of libel)

Ageing (entertainers) in chancy pantsies

And will he take his oaf on a Village People Bible?

 

20 January 2025

The White House Inaugural Banquet and the Idle Dishwashing Machine - doggerel

 Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The White House Inaugural Banquet

and the Idle Dishwashing Machine

 

 

Henry II: Fork?

 

Becket: It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves you dirtying your fingers.

 

Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.

Becket: Yes, but it's washable.

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

 

-Becket (1964)

 

The White House dishwashing machine is idle, kids

Our leaders grub with fingers for their food

Cardboarded burgers as greasy pyramids

On mahogany Queen Anne tables strewed

 

The sycophants kiss their effendi’s (ring)

And fall to feeding at his soigne trough

No waiters are needed to pour and pass

The diners chortle and chew and choke and cough

 

The White House dishwashing machine is idle, guys

(Dessert is Velveeta oozing over French fries)

Comment is Freed 

From:samf@substack.com

To:mhall46184@aol.com

Image is from a previous occasion, not the 2025 Inauguration

The Holy Bible as a Base for a Potted Plant - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Holy Bible as a Base for a Potted Plant

 

On a little shelf in our local pharmacy

A somewhat tattered Bible has reposed for years

And on that Bible is positioned a potted plant

And above them on the wall a cowboy cartoon

 

The iconography is elusive to me

One seeks for meaning in an assemblage:

So why this thing in this place at this time?

Existentially speaking (as we said in the ‘60s)

          Why?

 

A curious piece of iconography

On a little shelf in our local pharmacy

Dag Hammarskjold Negotiates with Himself and with God - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Dag Hammarskjold Negotiates with Himself and with God

 

Cf. Auden’s introduction to Vagmarken

 

 

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny

but what we put into it is ours.

 

Vagmarken (Markings), p. 55 in the 1965 Knopf edition

 

 

When you were a little child

If you attend a school named for Dag Hammarskjold

How long did it take you to learn to spell his name?

 

And you are now an adult

And blessed with Hammarskjold’s Vagmarken

How long did it take you to joy in his transcendent good?

Binding Each Word with a Prayer - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Binding Each Word with an Incantation, a Charm, a Spell

 

You. Not a generalized out-there “you” but – YOU

 

Gentle Writer

 

A mysterious thought is dream’ed unto you

Or a conclusion sails from your observant mind

 

You take a pen of goose-quill carefully carved

You dip it into a horn or pottle of ink

Not a metaphorical inkhorn of floridity

But the horn of a beast, hollowed out

Stoppered with a fitted wooden plug

And charged with ink of a curious blue

Of minerals or dyes or the juice of berries boiled

And worked with pagan spells or Christian prayers

 

You take an expensive page of animal-skin

Worked out with scrapings and scrubbings and acids

Or perhaps imported sheets of Egyptian papyrus

(Against which some of the younger brethren sneer)

 

Remember the annual budget! Be careful, now!

Paper doesn’t grow on trees, you know!

(Well, you could argue about the papyrus)

 

You set the light just right, the sun or a lamp

The Altar is where candles glow in honor of Our Lord

(And then there’s the budget; candles are expensive)

So you must work with the sun or a tallow lamp

At a writing slope angled as the amarius says

 

You think a thought

You lift your pen

With a prayer upon it

You guide it down

You write a word

 

A word

 

Each word is magic

 

 

 

 

 

 

What did you write?

Front Toward Enemy - very short free verse poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Front Toward Enemy

 

If

In what we may laughingly call real life

You can read those three words

You’re in the wrong place

‘Bye-‘bye

The Cold Has Gotten Old - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Cold Has Gotten Old

 

 

  For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snow-storms...

 

-Thoreau, Walden

 

 

The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees

And little lights in all their vestmental tints

No longer counterpoint the dark northern breeze

No visions of spring, no dreamings, no hints

 

The happy lawns of summer are mud and frost

The path to the cowshed is a rattle of sleet

The trail to the fishing hole was yesterday lost

And our boots are too thin for our freezing feet

 

But after our chores boiling hot coffee, please -

The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees!

Nothing You Write is Confidential - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Your Poem’s Background Check

 

And above all, who is in power in that part of the country,

or, rather, who will be by the time we get there?

 

-Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

We don’t suffer a Soviet Writers’ Union

Except that we do – and what are you up to?

Have you written an ordinary adjective

That will be forbidden in a future place?

          You sound suspiciously colonialist

 

Last year DEI was mandatory

This year it will be a forbidden scheme

What guidelines for little magazines

Will be cleansed in the New Order to come?

          Harriet Monroe is a non-person now

 

Who will be in charge of your poetry and your life

Whenever you don’t get to wherever it was 

          that you were going?

Your Changes Have Been Made - poem

 The transfer has botched the formatting. Please accept this as is.

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

Your Changes Have Been Saved

 

 

Noticed the passive voice              the passive voice is to be noticed

 

You did not make changes             changes were not made by you

                                                       but changes were made

 

You did not save changes                 changes were not saved by you

                                                          but changes were saved

 

If you were relevant you might have been consulted

Imagine There's No "Imagine" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Imagine There’s No “Imagine”

“Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

-G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Imagine a world without anthems that whine

It’s difficult if we try; the ‘seventies cry

Rockabilly tunes in the communion line

And fling fluorescents from a dropped-ceiling sky

 

The ‘seventies tell the Bible what to say

And dangling speakers program us with a primitive beat

Manifestos proclaim the ideology of the day

The Gospel is reduced to an electronic tweet

 

But, peace! 

 

The tie-dyed ‘seventies still croak and wail

But it is the Eternal that will prevail

 

12 January 2025

Stand-To for Night Patrol - short poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Stand-To for Night Patrol

 

 

The Americans were said to believe that the Communists are on the defensive…

 

-New York Times, 11 January 1970

 

I keep seeing a boat’s black silhouette

Upon the red water, against the red sky

And the black-death tree-line along the shore

A dark, decaying scene, and I don’t know why

There is More Than One Book - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

There is More Than One Book

 

A civilization writes and reads its books

As poetry, pictures, prose, and glorious song

Of war and work and love and peaceful fields

Scholarship and courage and a people’s arts

 

But when unhappy men with an unhappy god

Maintain that their one book is all we’ll need

In submission to build an empire of death

The threat is clear: their god doesn’t want us

 

Reading and writing are civilization

From the very beginning of Creation

52 Hebrew Words - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

52 Hebrew Words

 

Max gave me a book: 52 Hebrew Words

For Christmas

Appreciate the irony that isn’t there –

If Judaism isn’t real, then neither are we

 

Words in Hebrew seem to be topped as flames

As Light - the light as truth, the light for truth

As flame for sacrifice, as flame for peace

As Torah unrolled, all Creation unrolled

 

Everything begins with a word, the Word

Today we will begin with Shema – Hear

 

With gratitude

 

 

52 Hebrew Words. Dave Adamson. Christian Art Gifts: Bloomington

Reading the Room - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Reading the Room

 

I don’t know to read a room, but look –

I’m still pretty good at reading a book

A Colonial project - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a victim of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a perpetrator of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a victim of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Or is it

 

THE Colonial Project

 

And whose?

 

I think I’ll make a pot of tea

 

If that’s not too colonial for anyone

 

And would you like a cup?

 

May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland

 

Man arrested entering the Capitol with a machete and three knives

 

-U. K. Daily Mail

 

 

No weapons in the Capitol; it’s a rule

The adults who work there must be safely bubbled

But when some pimply oaf brings a gun to school

No one in D.C. seems especially troubled

I am a Ptolemaic - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

I am a Ptolemaic

 

 

There was a star danced, and under that I was born

 

-Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, II.i.349

 

 

This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got

Our Narnia, our Middle-Earth; it’s green

It’s green and blue and round, an almost-sphere

Fitted with all the ancient conveniences

 

Let the stars encircle us as a crown

And who will dare to say it is not so?

For we are commanded to grow this garden

By the light of the sun, and of faith and love

 

As Shakespeare might have said, this blessed plot -

This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got

"LA Fires Bring Art to a Halt" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

“LA Fires Bring Art to a Halt”

 

Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art and Its Discontents

 

No.

 

A fire brings nothing to a halt

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives -

 

A poet abandoning her car to flee for her life

Holds to her heart her notebooks in grocery-store bag

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A trumpeter manages to save the mouthpiece at least

While carrying his child out to an ambulance

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A sculptor’s eyes record a wall of windows

To be re-molded as life-filled windows of dreams

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

Firefighters wrestling a hose through smoke and heat

Are a choreograph of life against flaming death

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

An artist whose studio is now but smoke

Will stir ashes and water, and paint again

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A little girl will write of her little dog

Her bestest pal whom she never saw again

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

In a shelter tonight an aging man

Will sing to himself the love songs of his youth

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

 

 

                                   then patch

 

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

 

-Mary Oliver, “Praying”