The Back of the Wardrobe - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Back of the Wardrobe

 

If you invite me to your house one day

And if in a spare room you have a wardrobe

Then will you let me open it? I pray

And reach far in, and touch and tap and probe

 

Old coats, old shoes, old dreams, your MeeMaw’s old hats

Someone’s uniform from a long-ago war

Boxes of Christmas ornaments stacked on some mats

Some surprisingly cold mothballs rolling on the floor

 

Because your wardrobe might be an Advent itself

With Narnia on the other side

Eight Lamps to Give Us Light - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Eight Lamps to Give Us Light

 

For the Martyrs of Bondi Beach

 

Hanukkah, 5786

 

 

For all the boots of the tramping warriors
    and all the garments rolled in blood
    shall be burned as fuel for the fire.

 

-Isaiah 9:5

 

 

The Temple in Jerusalem cannot be destroyed -

For all the bloody-booted conquerors

Who swagger and clatter and rattle over the Stair

Defile and burn and pillage only their own souls

 

Wherever a candle is lit, the Temple is there

Wherever the yad touches a davar, the Temple is there

Wherever Truth is honored, the Temple is there

Wherever children sing, the Temple is there

 

Temple and Torah, poet and prayer

Poetry, prayer, eight lamps, and love, and care – 

                                           the Temple is there

The Hate in Orwell's 1984 was only Two Minutes - poem, sort of...

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Hate in Orwell’s 1984 was only Two Minutes

 

Progressive, Progressivist, Culture warrior

Boomer, GenX, GenZ, Millennial

Liberal, Conservative, Neo-con

RadTrad, Fascist, Neo-Fascist

Socialist, Neo-Socialist, Marxist

Communist, Trotskyite, Colonialist

Neo-colonialist, Imperialist, Neo-imperialist

Occupier, Bourgeois, Petite bourgeois

Libertarian, MAGA, Capitalist

Nazi, Neo-Nazi, Invader

Zionist, Settler, Sexist, Neo-sexist

Denier, Neo-denier, Reactionary

GenY, GenY-inian, Neo-GenY-inian

Social Parasite, Sheeple, Feminazi

Limousine liberal, Champagne Socialist

Counterrevolutionary, RINO

Low-information voter, Elitist

Republicrat, Democrap, MAGA-tista

Social justice warrior, Garbage people

Low-IQ voter, racist, Leftist

Cracker and Queer, and maybe Cracker-Queer

People-Who-Don’t-Look-Like-Me-inian

Neo-People-Who-Don’t-Look-Like-Me-inian

 

All sorts of names we scream at each other

Abjectly obeying our Dear Leaders’ trends

So quick to condemn each sister and brother

But maybe we all could just try to be…friends?

Anthony's Pilgrimage in Nunavut - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Anthony’s Pilgrimage In Nunavut

 

 

“What went ye into the desert to see?”

 

-Saint Matthew II

 

 

What went ye among the Innu to see?

 

To see

To hear

To smell

To taste

To touch

 

Sedna and Qailertetang have given you fish

They have fed you. And now you must sit and learn

 

What went ye into the waters to see?

From the ice and the rocks the waters flow

Rippling in the light to delight the eye

The dancing, shimmering visions from Ignirtoq

 

What went ye among the whispering rocks to hear?

The Angakkuq of earth, water, and air

Whose teachings and songs the people memorise

The liturgies of good and ancient ways

 

What went ye into the waters to smell?

Healing vapours from the dawn of Creation

From Taimmani until now, forever

For The People, and for the stranger too

 

What went you into the deep North to taste?

There is truth in salmon, and salt in the air

You can taste the stories on the shifting winds -

(And on Sunday there’s lunch after Mass)

 

What went ye along the falling streams to touch?

If you touch the earth, the ice, the sea

You touch the Unipkaaqs, you touch their truths

And you will be healed by the touch of those truths

 

Malina passes, Aningan rises - tonight

The eternal dances of the spheres to light

This land of Nunavut, this realm in white

Be healed, and know that all is made aright

 

Sit

 

Sit before the fire

 

Sit in silence and learn from Nunavut

 

See

Hear

Smell

Taste

Touch

A Right Turn in Viet-Nam - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Right Turn in Viet-Nam

 

 

And whether we shall meet again, I know not.
Therefore our everlasting farewell take.
Forever and forever farewell…
If we do meet again, why we shall smile;
If not, why then this parting was well made.

 

Julius Caesar V.i.125-129

 

 

This is not a metaphor for anything

Only a memory of driving an ambulance

A clapped-out relic of the Second World War

On a street on the Tien Sha Peninsula

 

1969

 

For a left turn the driver extends his left hand

And waves

It’s okay to wave back, but that’s not the point

For a right turn the driver extends his right hand

And waves

It’s okay to wave back, but that’s not the point

If there’s a passenger, he extends his right hand

And waves

It’s okay to wave back, but that’s not the point

If there are two passengers, the one most to the right…

But you get the point

It’s okay to wave back – that’s the point

 

A Dodge ambulance, a Vietnamese Army Jeep, and a Renault

Meet at an intersection – and somehow miss each other

 

And I miss Viet-Nam.

                                                 If we do meet again…

Cats Creep in on Measurable Meter - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

Cats Creep in on Measurable Meter

 

Having Coffee with Carl Sandburg

 

Little cats do not creep as the sleepy fog creeps

But rather in a so-soft measurable meter -

Besides, the fog does not wear little bells

Or an electronic tracker to beep its creep

 

In the foggy hours of the untimed night

Dear cat pads silently across my face

And mews her gentle let-me-out song

To join the sacred mysteries on misty fields

 

At dawn I ask her what strange worlds she has spanned -

She sweetly purrs to me, “you wouldn’t understand”

A Window on the Century - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Window on the Century

 

Pasternak is said to have raised a window

On a sunny winter day to ask

“Children, what century is it outside?”

A logical question

Restricted Area - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Restricted Area

 

No public or media access

 

Cameras and recording devices prohibited without prior authorization

 

Whoever our government orders beaten or shot is not our business

 

God bless America

The Voices are Talking about Nat - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Voices are Talking about Nat

The Voices slither about like Lady Macbeth

Claiming arcane knowledge of life and death

Hissing subtly with their smoky breath

Their business manager is a dude named Seth

 

(Seth attends art school at night and says his instructors don’t understand his depth of existential being-ness and, like, stuff.)

 

They (The Voices, not Seth) visit me nightly when I’m asleep

Approaching me in crouch and crawl and creep

Desiring to drag my soul down into the deep

Piling my vanities onto a vermiculous heap

 

(The Voices took my evening class at Cinder Block Community College and slouched sullenly in the back wearing their Grateful Dead baseball caps on the few occasions they bothered to show up. They filed a complaint against me for dropping them.)

 

They usually lurk in my right parietal

So, shhhhh! - they’re rather anti-societal

 

(They’re all The Office fans and are looking for affordable housing in Scranton if you know someone with a deal.)

Plato's Alligator of the Cave - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Plato’s Alligator of the Cave

 

The real reason Plato missed Socrates’ execution

 

Plato, in a moment famously historical

In that scary cave had a philosophical hunch

He took an alligator for allegorical

The alligator, alas, took him for lunch

'Flu Jab at the Supermarket with Rotisserie Chicken and Anaphylactic Shock - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

‘Flu Jabs at the Supermarket

 

To the supermarket with a shopping list:

 

1 Brookshire Brothers rotisserie chicken

 

1 bag of Purina dog chow

 

2 pints of Coffee Mate for this low, low price

 

A half-gallon of No Pulp Florida’s Natural

A Farmer’s Cooperative Since 1933

100% Premium Orange Juice from Concentrate

Owned by Florida Farmers

 

And a ‘flu jab. Not by Florida farmers

 

Next week my nurse practitioner has a special on butter

Which will be, as always, country farm fresh

League Tables for the Lovelorn - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

League Tables for the Lovelorn

 

V: Give her up, old man; she’s out of your league.

 

R: Impossible; I never joined a league.

A Homily Idling in Neutral Just off the Four-Lane to Emmaus - a poem about long sermons

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Homily Idling in Neutral Just off the Four-Lane to Emmaus

 

This is a warm Sunday in November

But we still watch for I.C.E. in the parking lot

And for a cold front promised but not delivered

Through the almanacs and weather distorts

 

Just now the celebrant, too, seems to be stalled

Chocked up at Luke 18 with his mutter running

The same illustrations repeated over and over

Like that same old cactus in a Road Runner short

 

Dear Lord

 

I pray for your priest while he is rebuking sin -

Please help him bring his homily to an end!

A Child’s Thanksgiving…WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY, YOUNG MAN!? - rhyming doggere.

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Child’s Thanksgiving…

WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY, YOUNG MAN!?

 

Sort of like Christmas, with its own small joys

Turkey and dressing, but not any toys

 

Grandpa at dinner babbles about his bowels

With a chorus of most dramatic vowels

 

Grandma discourses on her surgeries

The latest ones implanted mechanical knees

 

Mother and Big Sis are busy in the kitchen

With a whole lotta hissin’ and (rhymes with kitchen)

 

“WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY, YOUNG MAN!?

DO YOU WANT TO FEEL THE SWIPE OF MY HAND!?”

 

“They get it from those app things today -

I think you need to take his ‘phone away”

 

The uncles thunder on about politics

And any who disagree are Bolsheviks

 

The aunts all painted like marionettes

Escape to the lawn for their cigarettes

 

And I am exiled to the children’s table

With snotty little cousins, like unclean elves

And eye-brow-warned to behave ourselves -

And that’s the end of this Thanksgiving fable

Remembrance of Poetry Magazines Past - poem (fancy that)

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

                               Remembrance of Poetry Magazines Past

 

 

Our intellectual Marines,

Landing in little magazines

      Capture a trend.

 

-Auden

 

 

          UP THE REVOLUTION

A travel-back-in-time wish for me might be

          ECOLOGY NOW

To those hippie book shops in San Diego

          //// THE PIGS

Mimeographed little poetry magazines

          GIVE PEACE A CHANCE

With their mimeographed art-class covers

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR

 

TUNE IN TURN ON DROP OUT

Posters for the protest in Balboa Park

          DROP ACID NOT BOMBS

Sunlit little tables and cigarettes

          //// NO WE WON’T GO

Chipped cups of Jamaica Blue Mountain

          POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Percolating The Revolution in CAPS

          DON’T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY

 

          PEACE LOVE AND HARMONY

Hippie chicks in turtlenecks and berets

          FLOWER POWER

Their delicate laughter scorning the Proletariat

          NEED RIDE TO SAN FRANCISCO COOL PEOPLE ONLY

 

And, like, do you dig Yevtushenko?

Cats, Coffee, Choices, Autumn Leaves, Friends - short poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Cats, Coffee, Choices, Autumn Leaves, Friends

 

I sat outside this golden autumn day

Thinking about things, as old people do

And about the thoughts you send my way –

I thought

About choices. And Coffee. And cats. And leaves.

And you.

Northern Lights and a Little Magic - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Northern Lights and a Little Magic

 

I walked out to the hayfield under the stars

To see the Northern Lights that weren’t there

But the grasses whispered in the autumn night

And then best of all

I heard you singing

Cranky Old Aunt Robert - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Cranky Old Aunt Robert

 

“I just don’t go to funerals anymore,” he said

Oh, he was all right, the town’s bachelor lawyer

He was just like that, as everyone agreed

A bookish old lawyer and the town eccentric

 

When we were young, he and I read Paradise Lost,

Along with Friend Tod, of happy memory

But with time he recused himself from life

And had me ‘phone him about the town doins’

 

“I just don’t go to funerals anymore,” he said

But a week or two later

                                            he did

Your Words, Your Way - poem

 Your Words, Your Way

 

At the end of the day, your words, your way

Now healing and sealing the wounds of your friends

Giving grace and peace to the Vespers hour -

We open your book and look, and read your joy

 

At the beginning of night, your words, your light

Through your verse rehearse the teachings of peace -

They are to us a healing waterfall of dreams

And then a covering warm with autumn-night stars

 

Now you sleep too; this soft blanket is for you

For your happy dreams, sweet and true, all night through

We See Stories as We Walk - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

As I was a-walking One Morning for Pleasure – 

We See Stories as We Walk

 

 

From “Git Along, Little Dogies”

-American, traditional

 

 

The road doesn’t end here, but something did

In the lonely dark, with a cigarette and beer

A can of Miller Lite drained out last night

And a cigarette end, to mark an end

 

An end to love, now faded in the sun

One of each, not two, an empty man

Going home alone, stopping here a while

And wondering why his everything went wrong

 

The road doesn’t end here, but something did -

And maybe there’s a job waiting in Wyoming