The Stone, the Shell, and the Lance - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Stone, the Shell, and the Lance

 

-Wordsworth, Prelude, Book V, line 70 and following

 

Mathematics were always quarried stones to me

A chaos of integers, carries, and sums

Cascading down a dusty, crumbling slope

And piled up as a useless heap of rubble

 

But words, layered words, curving and dancing words

Are shimmering shells in stilly tidal pools

There waiting for my eyes, my thoughts, my speech

To play them, work them, hold them as chalices of truth

 

And the lance? The knight, he wields his wicked lance

Only to herd poor prisoners into algebra

Every Poem is a Translation - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Every Poem is a Translation

 

Wordsworth considered his rainbow up on high

And what he saw and felt through it, he wrote -

Translating an arc of refracted light

Into a transcendent vision of life

 

But his considerations through paper and ink

Are but darkness and silence without readers

Because the rainbow needs our vision, our joy

Without which there is no rainbow at all

 

We open the book, the page, the words, the light

To find the rainbow that he wrote to us

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

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

 

Barney Fife! Thou Shouldst be Living at this Hour

 

-as William Wordsworth did not say

 

Police chiefs are costumed as admirals these days

Or as generals, with medals and eagles and stars

Peaked caps and polished boots, more Patton than Patton

In stern command of parking-lot plywood lecterns

 

Their trousers are crisply pressed, as are their frowns

And all their seams line up with military precision

Each gold and silver button polished as befits

Leaders formidable to civilization’s foes

 

And thus they appear, gloriously attired

Explaining to their people why they’ve just been fired

 

 

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