Sunflower - photo, Nikon J1 (a cheap plastic spring crumbled; if only Nikon would honor the warranty...)

A Russian Series, 10: A Soldier Smoking a Cigarette - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Soldier Smoking a Cigarette

A soldier lay beside a railway line
Smoking a cigarette, not thinking of much
Among some hundreds of other conscript lads
Upon a grassy glacis above the fields

The boxcars waited in the stilly heat
The soldiers waited like young summer wheat
Occasionally stirred about by winds unseen
And finally stirred about by orders unheard

They rippled aboard, and were taken away:
Beside a railway line a shadow lay

Another Moonrise Picture from 1.30.2018 - photograph. Canon Eos Rebel

A Russian Series, 9: The Fifth Karamazov - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Fifth Karamazov

When young we identify with Alyosha
His optimism and his innocence
His fragile, flowering Orthodox 1 faith
A happy, almost-holy fool for Christ

When older, the sensual Dimitri,
With irresponsible lusts and desires
Grasping for the rewards of the moment
Now, ever now, wanting everything now

Then older still, as intellectual Ivan
Sneeringly aloft, above all faith and flesh
A constructor of systems and ideas
From the back pages of French magazines

Though never do we identify with
Nest-fouling, leering, lurking Smerdyakov
Our secret fear, unspoken fear, death-fear:
That he might be who we untruly are

But hear, O hear, the holy bells of Optina 2
Those Russian messengers 3 singing to us
Inviting us to meet Alyosha again
At Father Zosima’s poor 4 hermitage


1 Russian Orthodox
2 The name of the real monastery upon which Dostoyevsky modeled his fictional one
3 The Brothers Karamazov was first published as a serial in The Russian Messenger
4 Poor only by secular standards

Moonrise, East Texas, 1.30.18 - Photograph, Canon Rebel Eos

Kansas Arithmetic - Photo (Nikon J1, before it failed)

A Russian Series, 8: "Withdrawn from Salem Public Library" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Withdrawn from Salem Public Library”

 

Yevtushenko in a Used-Book Sale

“Salem Public Library, East Main Street,
Salem, VA 24153”
A happy book, thought-stained, and often-read:
An anthology of Russian poetry

Salem, Virginia must be a marvelous town
A library stocked with poetry, and stocked
With poetry readers who have turned again
And again to favorite pages here and there

Long-ago poets murdered by the Soviets
But finding love at last in Salem, Virginia












Re:

20th Century Russian Poetry: Silver and Gold
Selected and with an introduction by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Albert C. Todd and Max Hayward, editors
New York: Doubleday. 1993

Abilene, Kansas - photograph (brilliantly engineered but poorly built Nikon J1)

A Russian Series, 7: And Every Strand of Barbed Wire is Excused - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

And Every Strand of Barbed Wire is Excused

Perhaps the sound is pleasant to the ear
The concept that free men and women can choose
Wisely wise leaders wisely to lead them
Backwards, crashing the gates of Eden lost

And building there a world of perfect peace
No matter how many millions must die for it
And every strand of barbed wire is excused:
“Oh, well, at least we got rid of the Czar.”

The firing squads, the cries of dying children -
Perhaps those sounds are pleasant to the ear

Canadian Soldier Mural, Eisenhower Museum - Photograph, Nikon J1 (before it packed it in; Nikon wouldn't honor the warranty)

A Russian Series, 6: Did the Russians Hide Nukes in Your Sock Drawer? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Did the Russians Hide Nukes

in Your Sock Drawer?

The western sky is blue; the east is red
But try to put it right out of your head
If you find a Russian under your bed
Concealing a nuke that will kill you dead

The Intergossip surely must be right
So hit the keyboard now, and share the fright
On Social-Medium-Range all through the night
And type it really fast before…that
LIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ding-dong, the east is red, the west is blue
And rumors drift about, flake news, untrue

Keys to an Enigma, Eisenhower Museum, Abilene, Kansas - Photograph (Nikon J1, which Nikon won't repair under warranty)

A Russian Series, 5: If the Russians Find Out That the Iced Tea was Bugged...

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

If the Russians Find Out

That the Iced Tea was Bugged…

If the Russians find out that the iced tea
Was bugged they may well conclude that Area 51
Has tested Tom Brady’s jersey which was stowed
In a bus station locker in Donetsk

With the claim check issued to Kellyanne Conway
And passed to a North Korean operative via
A secret drop in a hollow pumpkin
Behind a voting machine in Spokane

That was hacked by a rogue albino nun
Carrying secret numbers for Rand Paul

The Grammys Celebrate Workers - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Grammys Celebrate Workers

“A forklift carrying barricades held up a crowd of commuters…”

-Los Angeles Times

With frosted breath, hands gloved against the cold
A working man forklifts the barricades
Into the streets, that he may block himself
From musical celebrations of work

Inside the temporary Palace of Culture
Musicians are being told what to wear
What they are for, and what they are against
Their speeches scrolled on discreet telescreens

The workers barred from work shiver and wait
For artists great, who never pay the freight

Detail from President Eisenhower's Boyhood Home - photograph (Nikon J1 with crumbling innards)

A Russian Series, 4: The Death of a Good and Faithful Spider - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Death of a Good and Faithful Spider

In Tod Mixson’s ikon corner a good and faithful spider fulfilled its vocation in an arachnid-life well spent.

A good and faithful spider lived its life
In spinning and dusting and catching pests
In the ikon corner among the saints:
Kyril and Methodius, Seraphim

Tikhon the Wonderworker, Vladimir
Anna of Kashin, Nicholas the Czar
Zosima, Xenia of Saint Petersburg
And all the cloud of holy Slavic witness

Whose images were guarded worthily
By a little spider who served God well

Summer Thunderstorm - Photograph (Nikon J1 with the crumbling plastic innards)

A Russian Series, 3: The Battle of Kursk, 1943 - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Kursk

At a railway junction great powers meet
To blacken the earth with a generation
Of young musicians, mechanics, physicians
Electricians, farmers, painters, and poets

And a philosopher who loves to fish
Ground into blood and screams and scraps of flesh
By the future which some have seen, which works 1
For the dress-uniform closed loop of power

Beneath the Russian sky good young men die
And the tyrants who send them lie and deny




1 Lincoln Steffens

Little Bighorn, Last Stand Hill - Photograph, Nikon J1 (with the crumbling plastic insides)

A Russian Series: 2 - "Until the First Star"

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Until the First Star” –

Orthodox Christmas Eve

The first star won’t be seen this night. The clouds
Obscure this fallen world, and seem to hide
The pilgrim paths to Bethlehem from all
Who seek their Saviour in the colding night

But yet the first star will be seen in truth,
In all the faces around the happy table
Gathered from field and forest, east and west,
Breaking the Advent fast with Christmas joy

And with the liturgies Our Lord is born
Beneath the star that will forever shine

School Book Cover, Mixson Brothers, Kirbyville, Texas, 1965 - photograph

A Russion Series, 1: All Change at Zima Junction

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

All Change at Zima Junction

For Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1932-2017

Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction
Changes lives; nineteen becomes twenty-one
With hardly a pause for twenty and then
Everyone asks you questions you can’t answer

And then they say you’ve changed, and ignore you
The small-town brief-case politician still
Enthroned as if she were a committee
And asks you what are you doing back here

And then you go away, on a different train:
Everyone changes trains at Zima Junction

“I went, and I am still going.” 1

1 Yevtuskenko: Selected Poems. Penguin,1962






An Apology

I have never visited Russia. I can’t read or speak Russian. Everything in this series is as authentically Russian as a liter of vodka bottled in, oh, Baytown, Texas. Still, I hope you enjoy this dream-pilgrimage.

I never meant to write poems about Russia, but then I never meant to read Russian literature. The United States Navy was parsimonious in its pay to enlisted men in the 1960s, so the base library and the San Diego Public Library were my free entertainment (as was riding up and down the glass elevator at the Hotel El Cortez, and walking the city and Balboa Park with shipmates), and in illo tempore I happened upon a Modern Library edition of Chekhov’s short stories.

Although Tolkien, McKuen, and other English-language authors have always been my favorites (or favourites), I also found that Russian authors (in translation, of course) also have so much to teach the young and reassure the old. Despite seventy years of horror under Communism, Russia never lost the Faith and never lost her love for literature, literature that shapes chaos into meaning. In so many ways Russia is a witness to the world.

The first book I bought upon returning home from Viet-Nam was the Penguin Modern European Poets paperback edition of Yevtushenko: Selected Poems. That 75-cent paperback from a bookstall in the airport in San Francisco is beside me on the desk as I write.

At this point the convention is to write that Yevtushenko changed my life forever, gave me an epiphany, and blah, blah, blah. He didn’t. If one’s life changes every time one reads a new author or hears a remarkable speaker or sees a great film, then was there a life to begin with?

But Yevtushenko, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Pasternak, Chekhov, and others came to be life-long friends. And since one writes about friends, I wrote about them too, and one day realized, as P.G. Wodehouse would say, that there might be a book in it.

Ruins of a CCC Camp, Arkansas - Photograph, Canon SLR

"Gov't Shutdown Risks an Undetected Asteroid Strike" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Gov’t Shutdown Risks an Undetected Asteroid Strike”

-news item

(I write this as a haiku since, apparently, we have little time left…)

Still, we conclude that

If an asteroid strikes us

We will detect it

John Keats Out by the Back Fence - Photograph, Nikon J1 (before the cheap plastic spring which keeps the battery in place failed, and which Nikon refused to remedy under their own warranty)

That Old "When I was in Graduate School" Thing...

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“When I was in Graduate School…”

“When I was in graduate school when I
Was at Oxford when I was working on
My doctorate at the Sorbonne when I
Was on my fellowship when I was hiking

The Andes on my gap year learning from
The Colorful Natives when I received
The Something-Something Prize for Young Poets
From The Oppressed Grant Recipients’ Front…”

One notices that

Literary articles never begin with
“When I was busting my knuckles on the drilling rig…”

Dawn - Photograph, Canon SLR

The Poets Have Been Remarkably Silent on the Subject of Firewood - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Poets Have Been Remarkably Silent on the Subject of Firewood

(as Chesterton did not say)

“…’on back…’on back…’on back…WHOA! Kill the motor.”
Leaning on the side of a pickup truck
Remembering the arcana of youth
On the farm: White Mule gloves, axe, splitting maul

Red oak, white oak, live oak, pine knot kindling
Three of us loading wood in the cloudy-cold
With practiced skill setting ranks of good oak
From the tailgate forward, settling the tires

Loading, unloading, stacking, and burning:
This winter’s firewood will warm us four times

The Physics of a Bridge, Baytown, Texas - IPhone photograph

We're All Icons Now - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

We’re All Icons Now

Is there anything left that isn’t iconic?
Each sports hero, actress, and tummy-tonic

Now let The People say “iconic”

Each recipe and coffee colonic
And every writer said to be Byronic

And let the reviewer chant “iconic”

Famous lovers, erotic or platonic
Mountains and islands, and plates tectonic

And let The Newsies type “iconic”

Animals natural or bionic
All weather systems, calm or cyclonic

And let Mr. Meteor cry “iconic!”

Every magazine is stuffed with “iconic”
Which any Byzantine would find ironic

And let the Romans cry “three dimensions!”

Wait...dimensions…declensions…these don’t rhyme with iconic…

Oh, and don’t forget that for every reviewer every writer weaves that same old layered tapestry of…something or other

And when you go home tonight just be sure to hug your children

This is not August - column re winter, snow, cardinals, burst pipes...

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

This is not August

As my MawMaw, of happy memory, used to say, the weather has been “airish.”

In yet another example of the settled science (cough) of global warming the temperatures dropped ‘way below freezing last week and, because there was a little bit of snow the newsies again and again filled time and space with vain repetitions of the tiresome and false “winter wonderland.”

Those who wake up on a 15-degree morning to discover a burst water line do not wax poetic about winter wonderlands.

One does not imagine that linemen, road crews, tow truck operators, police, fire, ambulance services, and others have ever alluded to working ten or more hours a day in freezing rain / sleet / hail as any sort of winter wonderland experience.

Because snow is uncommon here, the first flakes falling and swirling in eddies are fascinating. The cliché is that no two snowflakes are alike, but they seem to be, cold fluffs “that fall on my nose and eyelashes” (The Sound of Mucous) and look exactly alike, differing only in size.

As the snow accumulates it softens the contours of everything, and bounces the available alight around so nicely that it seems almost to be a light source itself. The dark winter woods gradually become light winter woods, and somehow quieter.

During freezes the squirrels and birds work the feeders, which need frequent re-fillings (hint – chicken scratch from the feed store is much less expensive than designated bird seed, and the critters are just as fat and sassy on their proletarian diet). The cardinals especially stand out in winter.

In cold weather the neatly stacked firewood from three summers of carefully saving trimmed limbs as neat billets descends further every day. Turning over the bottom course means turning hibernating frogs and worms and fierce-looking horned beetles out of their winter homes. One trusts that they simply grumble a bit and then dig deeper and resume their sleep.

After a day or so, when the sun reappears, the barometer aspires to higher things and the air seems to harden, the snow is like that last guest, the one who won’t go away. Ice melting from the roof drips musically from the icicles and to the ground, and road surfaces steam as the dark asphalt converts sunlight into heat through radiationless transition (and let the people say “Thermodynamics”).

The aging snow lurks along fencerows, the bases of trees, and dark corners, seeming to withdraw into itself. It is not pretty anymore, and hangs around for days until one afternoon you realize that, like your firewood, it is all gone.

Just as the parental complaint that “Your room looks like it was hit by a hurricane!” is not necessarily a metaphor in August, “It’s freezing in here!” is not necessarily a metaphor in January.

And this is not August!

-30-

When We Flew Among the Stars - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When We Flew Among the Stars

When we were children we lay in the grass
And counted the stars, but only up to
A hundred or so, because we got lost
But not out there in space, right here in space

For space had fallen here, all around us
Oh, don’t you remember? We were among
The stars, flying wildly through the silences
Beyond all time, beyond all sense of self

We almost found the secrets of Creation -
And then our mothers told us to come inside

Astrid-the-Wonder-Dachshund - Iphone photograph

Billy the Kid's Grave, Fort Sumner, New Mexico - Iphone photograph

Neo-Post-Colonial Artificial Intelligence Deconstructed - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Neo-Post-Colonial Artificial Intelligence Deconstructed

All intelligence is artificial
We do not huddle in burrows, issuing forth
Only to chase down other living things
Beat them to death, drink their blood, and eat them

We moderns huddle in cubes above the ground
With indoor plumbing through pipes that sometimes freeze
While we are gazing, searching for lost truths
In glowing screens made in slave-labor camps

And we have stopped slaughtering other creatures -
We have machines to do that for us now

Snow in East Texas - IPhone Photograph

Little Plastic Army Men in Action on a Snow Day - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Little Plastic Army Men in Action on a Snow Day

If I were a boy

I’d range my toy soldiers before the fire
Vast armies of plastic in green and grey
With the cannon blasting the enemy -
A glorious victory again today!

If I were a boy

I’d eat my morning cereal with Robin Hood
Propped up in his Whitman book before me
Its pages open to an England where
Every day is summer, green upon the lea

If I were a boy

My mother would remind me, to my sorrow
That I have a ‘rithmetic test tomorrow

Dad's Old Pickup - photograph

About that False Alarm in Hawaii... - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

I. From a Vietnamese / Cambodian / Egyptian / Israeli / Lebanese /

Sudanese / Syrian / Afghan Child’s Garden of Verses

Flare light
Flare bright
First flare I see tonight
I wish I may
I wish I might
Not be blown to death tonight

II. From an American Man’s Twooter of Self-Pity

Subtle beep
Subtle beep
‘wakening me from my sleep -
Oh, no! I’m going to die!
Not meeeeeee! Don’t wanna fry!
It’s all about ME – boo-hoo!
Poor ME! Poor ME! I’m gonna SUE!

A Take Away from the Take Away Steak Fingers - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Take Away from the Take Away Steak Fingers

     King Henry II: Forks?

     Thomas Becket: Yes, from Florence. New little invention. It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves
     you dirtying your fingers.

     King Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.

     Thomas Becket: Yes, but it's washable.

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

-Becket, 1964

Encapsulated in bivalves of foam
As bottom feeders in the fast-food chain
Small fragments of a poor dead cow, chopped, shaped
And formed into cow fingers that are not

For it behooves the diner thus to know
That cows haven’t any fingers at all
But the dear diner does, and digitally
Renders the cow fingers as nutrition

And that is all there is about cow fingers -
Not a topic on which the gourmet lingers

Still Life: Crucifix and Books - photograph

...Who Gives Joy to my Youth - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

…Who Gives Joy to my Youth

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

I will go in to the altar of God: to God who giveth joy to my youth.

-Daily Missal, 1962

For Brother Simon

A child thinks joy is all about the child
And so it is. And maybe an old man feels
That joy just isn’t for him anymore
To kneel his creaking joints before the truth

But it is

A wise man knows that he is still a child
An infant playing before the cave of winds
A Moses borne upon the ancient Nile
A shivering youth stepping into the Jordan

Though the lad be strong and the man be frail
Both are joyful children at the altar rail

Kirbyville, Texas at Night, ca 2008 - photograph

"Did Y'all Read About Those Chips in the Bible?" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Did Y’all Read About Those Chips in the Bible?”

In the Supermarket Checkout Line

“Did y’all read about those chips in the Bible?
Yessir, they got these chips now, and we ain’t
Gonna be able to buy or sell nothing
Without these here chips in our bodies

The C.I.A., some of those people got’em,
Yessir, and you ain’t going to the grocery store
And buyin’ nothin’ without ‘em. I read
Where it’s in th’ Bible, and, yessir, it is

Me, I’m standin’ on th’ World of th’ Lord
And I ain’t havin’ no chip put in, nossir”

Clouds and a Railway Crossing, Beaumont, Texas - photograph

"Go Inside Your Houses, Please" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Go Inside Your Houses, Please.”

“Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!”1 You are
Well advised not to ask questions about
What happened here. Just move along;
There was never anything to see here.

“Go inside your houses, please. All these people
will be taken care of.”2 “You can search Twitter
using the search box below or return
to the home page.”1 Go inside your screens, please

All this awkwardness will be taken care of
Go inside your screens, please. Go inside. Please.

1 NBC
2 Doctor Zhivago, 1965

What Do You Take in Your Coffee Enema? - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

How Do You Take Your Coffee?

A famous actress – let us call her Ms. Coffee – suggests a somewhat different way of taking one’s morning cuppa.

Is there something wrong with the way we take our coffee now?

Coffee is a celebration of humanity. The morning cup of reveille pleasantly eases us from the happiness of sleep and into a quiet determination to make the work day a brilliant success.

The driver packs his Thermos along with his bills of lading, the office or factory worker takes ten for a recharge with others around the table in the break room, the copper takes a break from patrol down at the Stop ‘N’ Rob, retirees cluster at the supermarket coffee table every morning around nine, the Navy chief petty officer is out of uniform without his paws grasping a coffee cup, and the Air Canada cabin attendant dutifully snarls to the passengers that there is no coffee.

From chalices of glass, ceramics, paper, foam, or plastic, drinking coffee or tea with co-workers and friends almost seems to constitute a rite of secular communion. Except on Air Canada, where there is no coffee, and how dare you ask.

Ms. Coffee, though, suggests that we should take our coffee through the other end of the alimentary canal.

This would probably displace the mirth (Macbeth III.iv.109) at the corner table. Or any table. “Well, hey, I’d better get back to the shop floor; that number three machine’s been acting wonky…”

Ms. Coffee alludes to the, um, assumption of coffee via the nether regions as a deep detoxification, a supercharge, and a whole lotta other stuff using buzzy words. Further, Ms. Coffee refers the reader to a site that for over a hundred dollars sells an appliance for this, um, experience.

The drugstore sells such medical appliances a whole lot cheaper. If you’re interested, that is.

Ms. Coffee’s own website is amusing – she’s even got a real, live shaman who shaves his head and looks all spiritual and stuff – and she’s got lots of pills and merchandise to sell you, and she is herself that famous metaphorical picture of health.

But – with one t – we are all well-advised to visit a nurse-practitioner or physician for our health care needs, not a website.

And, hey, how do you take your coffee?

-30-

The Pig Stand, Beaumont, Texas - photograph

If Sneezes were Horses, then Beggars Would...Sneeze, Probably - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

If Sneezes were Horses, then Beggars Would…Sneeze, Probably

O man – what art thou? Thou’rt not mighty
Clingingly pathetically to a Kleenex box
Instead of wielding a conqueror’s sword
Lifting patent medicines, not wine, to thy lips

Thy sneezing and wheezing will not win thee worlds
The book unread though open in thy lap
Thy darked-orbed eyes unseeing and unseen
Thy wretched, reddened nose – all is despair

And snot that runs in foul, polluted streams
O man – thou art little more than Nyquil-dreams!

Red Sunrise - photograph

A Meditation Upon Matters of Faith and Math - some of the shabbiest doggerel ever...

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Meditation Upon Matters of Faith

And the Worthy and Diligent Study

of the Arcana of Mathematics

as Recommended to Industrious and Thoughtful

Young Men and Women

For Kyle,

Who is Enduring His First College Maths

Our Saviour never said “Now solve for X”
Such is not written in any sacred tex(t)

Saints Paul and Barnabas on journeys Psidian
Did not refer to topics Euclidian

The Corinthians were divided only by factions
Never were they divided by fractions

Good St. Paul wanted all to comprehend
The truth, and not some subtle subtrahend

But still…

But still (to me it is a great frustration)
Numbers are how we measure Creation

With them we plant the Garden that is earth
Building it up with word and work and worth

So that we feed and clothe and mend and tend
With crop rows plowed, panels welded, cattle penned

Airplanes launched, fires put out, and light bulbs lit
Messages sent – there is no end of it!

So brew yourself a cup of coffee
Find your Euclid and dust it off(y)

Work those angles on your protractor
Add, subtract, calculate, and factor

Apply yourself most assiduously
Soon you’ll be an engineer, you’ll see!

Admired by all, a man of great knowledge –
And it began in community college

An Old Man Running While Carrying a Volume of The World Book Encyclopedia - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Old Man Running While Carrying a Volume of The World Book Encyclopedia

A Scene from a Hospital Waiting Room

Cups of coffee are reverently borne
Along the bright hospital corridors
By nurses, doctors, technicians, and all
Scrub-suited healers on their dutiful rounds

But wait! A lean, energetic old man
His wild white hair brimming his gimme cap
Dodges among the sacred cups, and runs
Up the stairs to the ICU waiting room

Clutching an old encyclopedia
Like a dispatch from the front –
                                                      I wish I’d asked

Kirbyville Elementary School, 2nd Grade, 1955-1956 - photograph

Photograph by D.T. Kent, Jr., of happy memory

Feast of the Epiphany - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Feast of the Epiphany

Grey days recede into dreary, drizzling dusks
Baptismal rains across the windows slip
And even the candlelight is not proof
Against the gathering gloom of heartfall

Shakespeare leans uncertainly on the shelf
And agonizes over his writer’s block
Milton is writing yet another tract
On faith while smoking Players cigarettes

Warnie and Jack are out for a brisk walk
And Tollers is busy correcting proofs
Under a yellow puddle of lamplight
Bleak Spenser in his grief Kilcolman weeps

We all hold castles abandoned and burnt
Friendships grown mouldy, squabbles unresolved
Walks not taken, rough drafts uncorrected
Pipes gone quite out, cups of tea gotten cold

Has it been that long since I saw you last?
Come in; I’ll put the kettle on for tea
Just leave your coat and brolly by the door
Come sit by the fire; come, and talk with me

Russian Children on Christmas Eve - poem

Russian Children on Christmas Eve

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 Hours
It is fitting and just; they too are royal,
Princes and princesses of the Emperor
And of that Child who in the manger slept

Then home to kutya, and so to their beds -
The Saviour blesses all dear little sleepyheads!

S rozhdyestvom Hristovym!


(In Orthodoxy the 6th of January is Christmas Eve)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snowlight - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snowlight

White snowlight, glowlight, brightening the woods
By praying down the sky to float among
The dark and creaking pillars of ancient oaks
Whose trunks and limbs are black with clinging ice

Drear, mouldering autumn leaves now lie at rest
Beneath soft-shoaling ripples of rare snow
Pale, iridescent light dances between
The clouds and the ground, and then back again

Shadowless colorings, pearlings, and frosts
At play with miracles in January.

Down at the Auto Repair - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Down at the Auto Repair - A Waiting Room Discourse

Blah blah blah Trump blah blah blah Bannon blah
Blah blah blah da(ng)ed schools blah blah it’s all
Fake news blah blah blah double-blah media
Clintons blah blah blah kids these days blah blah

Blah buzz buzz buzz that wouldn’t have happened
In my day blah blah blah I can’t believe
What they’re charging blah blah blah FEMA blah
Blah Trump blah blah they don’t want us to know

Blah blah blah da(ng)ed schools blah blah it’s all
Fake news blah blah blah double-blah Jesus

(You can turn it over if you want, but the other side’s just the same)

Meditation on a Ten-Dollar Timex Watch - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Meditation on a Ten-Dollar Timex Watch

A watch doesn’t really tell time, you know
Its tiny mechanism sweeps three hands
Around a dial locked in a little case
Upon a strap buckled around your wrist

And there it imitates the planet’s spin
And the planet’s spin is ordained by God
And the watch’s spin is ordained by man
So that we get to our haircuts on time

The solar system is a mighty work -
And a visit to the barber is nice

Is the End Near for Religion? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Is the End Near for Religion?

-news item

No one will ever acknowledge a MePhone
As the Lord of the universe, or as
The Creator from before created time
Born of an IBM Selectric

True plastic of true limited resources,
Sing Advent hymns unto an Apple II,
Whisper aves on a strand of transistors,
Or genuflect before a Model T

No consecration will ever obtain
Upon the altar of a microchip

A New Day of Freedom - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A New Dawn of Freedom

A new dawn of freedom? May it be so
Even in this artificial shift of time
According to those calendars and clocks
Who still attribute virtues to old Janus

For this is Mary’s day, especially so,
This last day in the Octave, now at dawn
And She is our new Dawn of freedom given,
Our Porta Caeli, Bearer of Our Lord

Now with the light we rise to greet the Light
A new dawn of freedom – and it is so

Janus Laughs - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Janus Laughs

Old Janus surely laughs at our mistakes
In thinking that the world begins again,
That pages turned in calendars and books
Reduce mysteries into measurements

Man Screams at Trump Robot Doll - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Man Screams at Trump Robot Doll

-news item

Just why would anyone scream at a doll?
A Disney doll in the Hall of Presidents
Apped up to creak and speak, but not to hear
(For even human presidents don’t listen)

So yelling safely at a dummied-down
Emmanuel Goldstein 1 of wires and wax
Is not unlike protesting a doorknob
Or verbally abusing a thermostat

Poor old rebel dude  – is this all he’s got?
Whatever he feels he is, he’s surely not


1 1984

The Beggar at Canterbury Gate - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Beggar at Canterbury Gate

The beggar sits at Canterbury Gate,
Thin, pale, unshaven, sad. His little dog
Sits patiently as a Benedictine
At Vespers, pondering eternity.
Not that rat terriers are permitted
To make solemn vows. Still, the pup appears
To take his own vocation seriously,
As so few humans do. For, after all,
Dogs demonstrate for us the duties of
Poverty, stability, obedience,
In choir, perhaps; among the garbage, yes,
So that perhaps we too might live aright.

The good dog’s human plays his tin whistle
Beneath usurper Henry’s1 offering-arch
For Kings, as beggars do, must drag their sins
And lay them before the Altar of God:
The beggar drinks and drugs and smokes, and so
His penance is to sit and suffer shame;
The King’s foul murders stain his honorable soul;
His penance is a stone-carved famous name
Our beggar, then, is a happier man,
Begging for bread at Canterbury Gate;
Tho’ stones are scripted not with his poor fame,
His little dog will plead his cause to God.

1 Henry VII, who built the Cathedral Gate in 1517, long after the time of Henry II and St. Thomas Becket

Hitler's Ride is for Sale - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Hitler’s Ride

One of Hitler’s sets of wheels, a ‘way-happenin’, straight-eight 1939 Mercedes 770K Grosser convertible, is up for auction in Arizona next month. You might want to drop by Scottsdale and kick a few tires.

Some features might still be under warranty. There is some slight damage from Vladimir Putin bench-pressing it.

Next year’s model will be made in China.

One imagines Hitler and Stalin, who were BFF until they began tiffing in June of ’41, drag racing along their demarcation line through Poland.

The big Mercedes was a good car for its time, but wasn’t a match for the American Studebaker. Or the Sherman.

Hitler’s car features armored glass and panels, which makes it just the thing to cruise American cities these days. The convertible top makes catching some rays as easy as strudel.

There is no mention of how many miles to the gallon, kilometers to the liter, or broken treaties to the leader.

The Mercedes Grosser doesn’t come with a sound system, and the radio is A.M. and with only one station, Radio Berlin. You might find a retro-fit at Montgomery Ward’s Electric Avenue. Siriusly.

There is no backup camera because anyone that close just didn’t need to be there, so tough keks.

Inside the glove compartment is a 1943 catalogue of Eva Braun’s spring clothing line. She was quite the designer. And her perfume – “When It’s Air-Raid Time in Heidelberg #6” – was a blast. There is also a road map showing the quickest routes home from Stalingrad, a fan letter from the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a Margaret Sanger fan magazine, and a picture of Ernst Rohm in a swim suit. More than just friends?

No doubt some guy will ask the seller if he will take a post-dated check: “Like, I don’t get paid until next week, like, you know, but I’m good for it; like, you can ask anyone around here who knows Ol’ Skeeter. Yeah, like, they’ll go ‘Yeah, Ol’ Skeeter’s good for it, like, you know.’”

“So what will you give me on this Ford Fiesta for a trade?”

Hitler was certainly a guy for our time – he was a teetotaler, a non-smoker, and a vegetarian, and sported some quirky face-fuzz. Outfit him in some knee-pants and a Che’ tee-shirt and he’d fit right in the queue at a coffee house in Seattle.

And his car – simply to die for.

But who would want that thing?

-30-

Rachel, Weeping for Our Children - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Rachel, Weeping for Our Children

From an idea suggested by Kelly Rogers

No soldiers come, with glaring eyes, with death
To drag our children out into the road
To thrust away their lives into the dust
With pilum, gladius, or manly fist

No Romans as advisors standing by
Amid obscenities, curses, and screams
A fog of witness for that old excuse:
It’s all about the quality of life

Confusion now persuades with soft, soft breath
And therapists come, soothingly, with death.

The Desperate Princewives in Toronto - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Desperate Princewives in Toronto

On Christmas eve a lineman hoists herself
Far up into the blowing ice to mend
The power that keeps our children warm at night
While waiting for good Santa Claus to come

On Christmas Day a cop patrols the streets
Alone against snipers with ‘47s
Keeping us safe while we grumble about cops
She’s left her children with her mom to watch

The morning after Christmas another mom
Jump-starts her ten-year-old car so she can drive
The slushy streets to her shift at Dairy Queen
For her career ladder at the deep fryer

In a studio in Canada two men
Well-guarded by their secret services
Well-fed, well-dressed well-chauffeured in their ‘zines
Escorted, piloted, guided, scripted

Express their happiness that working folk
Are wealthier and healthier than ever

Children Visiting for Christmas - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Children Visiting for Christmas – a Tragedy in Two Parts

I. A Mother to Her Child

“No! I mean no! Don’t make me get out of
this chair! No! In or out! No! Be inside or
outside! No! Don’t touch that! No! I said no!
No! No candy before lunch! No! Okay, but
No more! No! I said no and I mean no!
I mean no! No! Don’t make me get out of
this chair! No! In or out! No! Onnnne…Don’t make me
Go to two! Don’t touch that! No! I said no!
Onnnne…! I mean it this time! I said no! No!
No! Don’t make me get out of this chair! No!”

II. A Child to His Mother

“No, YOU! No! You can’t make me! No! No! No!
I want outside! No! I want inside! No!
No! I don’t have to! No! You can’t make me!
No! But I want it! Don’t tell me no! No!
I tell YOU no! You can’t tell ME no! No!
No! You can’t make me! No! No! No! No!
I want outside! No! I want inside! No!
No! I don’t have to! No! You can’t make me!
No! But I want it! Don’t tell me no! No!
I tell YOU no! You can’t tell ME no! No!”

Within the Octave of Christmas - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Within the Octave of Christmas

For Eldon Edge, 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 beer, 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.

But the Animals were First - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

But the Animals were First

“We read in Isaiah: ‘The ox knows its owner,

and the ass the master’s crib….’”

-Papa Benedict, The Blessings of Christmas

The ox and ass are in the Stable set
In service divine, as good Isaiah writes
A congregation of God’s creatures met
In honor of their King this Night of nights

And there they wait for us, for we are late
Breathless in the narthex of eternity
A star, a road, a town, an inn, a gate
Have led us to this holy liturgy:

Long centuries and seasons pass, and yet
The ox and ass are in the Stable set

Horseshoe, and it Crucified - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Horseshoe, and it Crucified

A hoodie girl outside the truck stop leans
Against a wall, huddled against the wind
While no one’s looking, sneaking a cigarette
A vision of desperation through the windshield

She’s selling Cowboy-Jesus “for the missions”
A table of lacquered cypress crosses
But instead of the Corpus a horseshoe
A horseshoe crucified – and, too, a girl

A poor, sad girl outside the truck stop leans
She’s selling Cowboy-Jesus for some boss

Or else

How we Teach our Children Hymns and Carols - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

How we Teach our Children Hymns and Carols

“We have seen His star in the east at a 20% discount”

Joy to the world at Canadian Tire
And free shipping until sing of Mary
Amazon roasting on an open fire
And no payments until January

O holy night down at the shopping mall
Adeste fidelis in a traffic jam
I saw three ships in large, medium, and small
O Christmas tree buy a Pajamagram

A new Rolex watch on this silent night -
But park with your packages out of sight

After-Christmas Christmas - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
From 2010

After-Christmas Christmas

Liturgically, Christmas begins at midnight on Christmas Eve and continues until the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6. The four Sundays before Christmas constitute Advent, not Christmas, and certainly not the dreary “Christmas Season” for so long inflicted on a suffering world. Too few understand this, and those who follow the Christian season as intended are to be found only in the history museum, between the reconstructed mastodons and the faux cavemen warming themselves at the flickering light-bulb fire behind school-trip-fingerprinted glass.

Christmas trees are nice at any time, though, and Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas,” presents, candles, decorations, cards, festive meals, happy-sad remembrances of those who now grace an even happier Table, and the liturgy on Christmas Eve.

After Christmas dinner there is sometimes a feeling that Christmas is over for another year, but in reality the season is only beginning. And this works out nicely because now one can enjoy Christmas itself, free of the sometimes unreasonable demands of the preceding month.

If the weather is fair, the kids can go outside to kick the new football – and each other, kids being kids. If not, they have plenty to do inside with new games, new books, and new toys, and the adults can have coffee and a second helping of pie, and then maybe another nibble of that turkey. No one has to go to the store for anything, and no one has to dress up for yet another do of any kind.

Yes, there is much to be said for the low expectations of Christmas afternoon.

The tree, compounded of toxic chemical waste in a country far, far away, need not be taken down anytime soon, though getting rid of the Komsomol-Operative-on-a-Shelf spying on your household and reporting any incorrect speech or behavior to Stalin-Claus is tempting.

One acquaintance concluded that the Tattle-tale-on-the-Shelf is a way of preparing American children for a life of surveillance. Once upon a time little boys and girls wanted to be cowboys and doctors and firemen and railroad engineers; now they are prepped to function as OGPU and STASI operatives: Big Elf is Watching You. Another acquaintance dismissed the Fink-on-a-Shelf as creepy, a Peeping-Tom-on-a-Shelf.

Once upon a time, little boys were made of sterner stuff, ripping off the heads of their sisters’ Barbies, but now they fear to take the Commie elf outside and dispatch him with their plastic pirate swords or Robin Hood bows and arrows. And that is if boys are now permitted plastic pirate swords or Robin bows and arrow at all: “Gee. Mom and Dad. A Greasy-Bake oven. In pink. Just what I’ve always wanted. Thanks. Wow. You shouldn’t have. Really.”

Soon enough the Epiphany will be here, and everyone will have to get down to the serious business of winter without colored lights and festive music. No matter what your shift is, you go to work in the dark and come home in the dark, and comfort yourself with the thought that at least January is not August with its merciless heat.

And then sometimes you can dig into the sofa cushions and find a chocolate candy misplaced during December’s merriment, and chocolate tastes even better in January.

If you find a plastic Easter egg from last year, well, that’s fun too, but you probably shouldn’t eat the goodies inside.

Happy, happy after-Christmas, everyone.

-30-

Never Trust a Guy Who Irons His Jeans - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Never Trust a Guy Who Irons His Jeans

Strong canvas is the stuff of adventure
Like a cowboy lassoing horses wild
It captures the ocean’s galloping winds
And to even wilder ships harnesses them

Strong canvas is the stuff of manly work
Defense against fierce cactus and desert dust
Loops for the hammer, pouches for the nails
Sacred vestments anointed with sweat and dirt

A good man works hard, and says what he means
But never trust a guy who irons his jeans

Love in the Corner Booth - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Love in the Corner Booth

Somewhere along US 96

His ducktail haircut from 1957
Fading to white, her voice without makeup
Sharing scripture verses and something about
Her latest operation and her miseries

Outside along the row of pickup trucks
A green-haired waitress smokes a cigarette
The fuzz of her Harley-Davidson coat
Pressed flat for love against the window glass

They’ve got a sale on tires down at Wal-Mart
Along the four-lane Christmas passes by

A Conversation about Whiteness - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Conversation about Whiteness

Wedding dresses, clouds in a summer sky
Those new tenny-runners in junior high
The towels the Navy issued all of us
Liquid Paper™ for covering typos

Wild geese winging the seasons, moved by God
The much-prayed pages in MeeMaw’s Bible
A sidewalk made playground with colored chalk
A blank page in the typewriter positioned

Ready, waiting for the next Langston Hughes
To write about rivers, or about…you

Why do We Write? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Why do We Write?

“Beauty will save the world.”1

-Dostoyevsky

If we accept that art helps us reveal
The hidden structures of the universe
As beauty transcendent in color and form
Harmonious truth in music, word, and dance

Then choosing sides in old men’s deadly games
Is merely empire-building, trunkless legs2,
And focusing upon our hurts and harms
Is but a dark Endorian3 conceit

If we build art in love, not for ourselves,
But for all others, we live beyond all time

1 Prince Myshkin in The Idiot
2 Shelley, “Ozymandias”
3 1 Samuel 28

Saint Mary Magdalene's Recycled Mobile 'Phone - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Saint Mary Magdalene’s Recycled Mobile ‘Phone

Her ‘phone was passed on to a parish priest
But they forgot to change the numbers and so
Her client-base kept telephoning him
At night, when the moon and the johns were full

“Confessions on Friday evening at seven”
Didn’t ring-a-ding anyone’s ding-ding
Maybe the lonely men in lonely rooms
Remembered then what their dear mamas said

And maybe they didn’t – life falls apart
Both in the street and at the Airport Inn



(predicated on a real event)

The World in Your Hands - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The World in Your Hands

A little bead between your fingers slips
And then another, and another yet
Linked with a bit of cord, in corde1  linked
Like planets all in rhythm with their sun

Each bead is our created world in small:
Each ocean a baptism, each island a hope
Each wind a prophecy whispering to
An exiled people waiting for the dawn

And for your fiat mihi to that Light
A little bead between your fingers waits

I 1n corde - "in the heart" from "In corde Iesu," "in the heart of Jesus"
2 Fiat mihi  - St. Luke 1:38

"Dear Valued Customer" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Dear Valued Customer”

Dear Valued Customer:

Old Hearth & Home Mutual Bank & Trust
Is changing its name to Cosmos Banking
And now to Financial Solutions Inc
And tomorrow to New Heritage Bank

Same familiar faces, same great service
A broader range of personalized products
Because, neighbor, you’re still our good neighbor
(We’ll need two kinds of identification)

But that’s enough bank sign-changing for now -
We’re all out of two-sided Velcro® tape

Hobo Jungle - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Hobo Jungle

It’s a jungle out there – across the road
A hoodie-man carrying a shopping bag
A turn, a thought, a blink, a pause – he’s gone
Like the silent lynx, disappeared among the trees

The stock market is up, the woods are dark
Beyond the lights, the refuge of lost men;
The old folks spoke of hobo jungles back when
Along the tracks, not near an office block

Beyond the glass, beyond the walls, beyond:
It’s a jungle out there – across the road

Christmas in Exile - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Christmas in Exile

The citizens of William’s Harbour, Labrador, will not celebrate Christmas in their old homes because now, except as a geographical expression, there is no William’s Harbour.

The 1992 moratorium on cod fishing ended the island’s chief industry, and summer tourism and subsistence fishing and harvesting were not enough to sustain the small and aging community. The government of Newfoundland and Labrador (now there is a forced marriage) set out a schedule for ending all services and offered everyone compensation in exchange for the titles to their homes.

Beginning in August the people of the island began boarding the ferry with their household goods for new lives away. And now William’s Harbour is dark, and the ferry sails no more.

While governments compute in terms of housing stock – not homes – and budgets, those subject to the probably necessary decisions in St. John’s have said farewell to their homes, their fisheries, their trap lines, St. Andrew’s Church on its little hill, and the graves of their ancestors.

Resettlement in denotation is neutral; in connotation one is reminded of the many misuses of the word as a euphemism: the many Trails of Tears of the First Nations, the Hitlerian "resettlement to the east," the Communists' resettlement of peoples in every land that ideology has ever infected, Le Grand Derangement of the Acadians, and Smallwood's forced resettlement of people from Newfoundland's outports.

There were no soldiers with bayonets dragging the people of William’s Harbour out of their homes or forcing them onto boats, but still the thoughtful man or woman can only be uncomfortable with the destruction of a culture as well as the dislocation of individuals and families by the decisions of distant rulers.

And, after all, the rulers will be in their own warm homes this Christmas.

On Christmas Eve the exiles will find other churches for the liturgies, maybe even another St. Andrew’s, but it won’t be on their island. As they light the candles and sing the ancient hymns at midnight they will know that over their old church and over Mama and Papa’s graves there is only darkness, only silence, only the cold Atlantic winds.



          For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
          Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
          No children run to lisp their sire's return,
          Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

-Gray, “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”

-30-

Saint Garden Gnome - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Saint Garden Gnome

An obscure barefoot friar in Italy
Long labored in the Perugian sun,
Heaped rocks upon rocks, and then other rocks,
Up to a wavery roof of broken tiles,
Repairing with his bleeding hands God’s church

Then, better known – it wasn’t his fault – this friar,
With others in love with Lady Poverty,
In hope and penance trudged to far-off Rome
To offer there his modest Rule of life,
Repairing with his mindful words God’s Church

Along the delta of the steaming Nile
He waved away the worried pickets, crossed
Into the camp of the Saracens
Preaching Christ to merciful Al-Kamil,
Offering with a martyr’s heart God’s Faith

Saint Francis is depicted in fine art
In great museums and in modest homes -
And you can find him too, down at Wal-Mart,
Between the plastic frogs and concrete gnomes.

Hello Poetry - unreliable

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Hello Poetry, aka HelloPoetry, He Po, and other unfortunate variants, is a free and enjoyable way of sharing poetry. Many of the submissions are, as one would expect, me-me-me-I-I-I free verse self pityings, but many others are thoughtful in content and artistic in construction. Given that verse has suffered a century-long decline in quality and appreciation as a part of popular culture, that any poetry is written at all is a marvel.

However, in the months I have participated in Hello Poetry the functionality of the site has been undependable – sometimes it has been down for days, and at other times it blocks submissions. Appeals to the webmaster are never answered.

Yesterday an attempt to post was blocked with a large “FORBIDDEN” and a code. Considering the possibility that my computer was infected or was sending false signals, I examined the system, cleaned the cookies, and backed up to several hours before the metaphorical wall was raised. Submissions were still blocked, and later, notes to other writers. This morning I attempted to submit via another computer in another location, and was again “FORBIDDEN.”

The site is free, and the webmaster may choose to accept or reject submissions as he wished, and I am free not to indulge erratic service and ill manners. My poor efforts will continue to be available on reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com (which is not really reactionary, though it may well be drivel).

Cheers,

Lawrence

Vouchsafest Thou? - just for fun

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Vouchsafest Thou?

Do you enjoy the word "vouchsafe" as much
As I? It isn't as musical as the phrase
"Thence forward," or “joylich,” “leman,” and such
Or "confusticate" - who says that these days?

“Wherefore,” “abroche,” let us now celebrate
“Antic” English words: “aforetime,” “perforce”
“Slowcoach,” “freshet”, “befall” - at this late date?
And dear “daffadowndilley” (but of course!)

“Declaim,” “forsooth,” “marchwarden,” and “descry,”
And let us not forget the sweet “day’s-eye!”

Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago

for two friends

Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.

A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.

Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.

For generations the seasons in darkness slept,
Since neither love nor life were free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world sighs

The old world sighed in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascended, pushed the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.

And now golden sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.

The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring fragments of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.

For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over her wide lands high church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s eternal now.



(The 1965 movie version is brilliant, and the recent mini-series is good, but these worthy endeavors are but shadows of the novel.)

On the Vigil of the Nativity - poem (still unsure re the title)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On the Vigil of the Nativity

In a Capuchin friary, on a wall
In faded letters from the long ago
A simple sign asks the casual visitor

            “Why Are You Here?”

And that’s a fair question; it always is
If I am in one place, I am not in another;
Unless someone has forced me otherwise
I have made a choice to be where I am

So why do I kneel here (and half asleep)
In a Stable, among cattle and sheep?

Pilgrimage Along the A1, from Peterborough to Chesterton - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Pilgrimage Along the A1

From Peterborough drops a road
Across the Fens, into the past
(Where wary wraiths still wear the woad);
It comes to Chesterton at last.

And we will walk along that track,
Or hop a bus, perhaps; you know
How hard it is to sling a pack
When one is sixty-old, and slow.

That mapped blue line across our land
Follows along a Roman way
Where Hereward the Wake made stand
In mists where secret islands lay.

In Chesterton a Norman tower
Beside Saint Michael’s guards the fields;
Though clockless, still it counts slow hours
And centuries hidden long, and sealed.

And there before a looted tomb,
Long bare of candles, flowers, and prayers,
We will in our poor Latin resume
Aves for old de Beauville’s cares.

A Bitcoin for Your Thoughts? - column

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Bitcoin for Your Thoughts?

Does anyone in our federal government do anything except call each other rude names and investigate each other? If we tell our children and grandchildren about the good old days when there were grownups in the White House and in Congress, the little kids will think we’re palming more Santa Claus yarns off on them.

“Once upon a time there were two fine men, President Reagan and Speaker of the House O’Neill, and although they didn’t agree about everything they respected each other and loved their country very much…”

+ + +

George P. Bush is Texas’ land commissioner and a fine man. His vision for preserving the physical elements of the history of our republic and now our state is brilliant. But he needs to shave. The Don Johnson / Justin Trudeau look is soooooooooooo 1970s.

+ + +

Hey, how about visiting San Francisco this year? If you are murdered in the streets the judge and jury will show their love for the murderer. For you, nothing.

+ + +

“Merry Christmas” has always been acceptable. I have never encountered any situation in which an organization declared “Merry Christmas” inappropriate. I keep reading about that on the GossipNet, and hearing about it from the druggie draft dodger on midday radio, and maybe banning “Merry Christmas” has happened, but I’ve never encountered it. Andy Williams, of happy memory, long ago recorded a song called “Happy Holidays,” and that’s fine too.

+ + +

Jim Nabors has died. Shazam! Citizen’s arrest! Citizen’s arrest! He was a great comic actor and a singer. You can find him, as PFC Gomer Pyle, singing “The Impossible Dream” before the Marine Corps orchestra on YouTube.

+ + +

Bitcoins – just remember the stories about magic beans and golden eggs.

+ + +

Like typewriters, passenger trains, short stories, radios, fountain pens, and telephones, wristwatches had a run of about a century. You seldom see them anymore.

Once upon people wore wristwatches; now they appear to have MePhones surgically attached to their hands.

+ + +

Hey, it’s ‘way past time to throw out the last of that Thanksgiving turkey. There’ll be more for Christmas!

-30-

Happy Merry Hallothanksmas - column

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Happy Merry Hallothanksmas

Halloween, an occasion of insanity for which no honest pagan would ever take credit, is long over, and we are now in a season not quite as bizarre.

Having suffered weeks of debates about who offered the first thanksgiving, and where, our attention is now turned (whether or not we wish it to be turned) to the next debate, The True Meaning of Christmas.

The four weeks prior to Christmas are the Christian season of Advent. Christmas properly begins on midnight on the 24th of December and ends with the Feast of Epiphany on the 6th of January.

But perhaps we should mention Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany only in the past tense.

These Christian seasons, along with All Saints and All Souls, have long been culturally censored by the Macy’s-Amazon Continuum, and organically recycled into one long distraction, Hallothanksmas. Some call it The Christmas Season, but this is the one thing it categorically is not. Hallothanksmas begins around the first of September and concludes with the beginning of Mardi Gras on December 26.

This cobbled-together season is honored in television shows about the Proletariat camping on the concrete outside Mega-Much-Big-Box stores the size of the Colosseum in Rome. At the appointed hour the electric bells ring out and an official opens the Gates of Consumer Heaven so that The People can crash against them and each other in a blood-sacrifice combining elements of the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona and a jolly good riot between the Greens and the Blues in Constantinople.

The modern Proletariat compete not for a crown of laurel or of gold, which moths and rust consumeth, but for the everlasting honor and street cred of purchasing a made-in-China television set (in the vernacular, a “flatscreen”) much like the ones they already have, no matter how many of their fellow worshippers must be wounded and killed for it.

The old Christian seasons were predicated on the salvation story, gratitude, and good, healthy merriment; Hallothanksmas is ornamented with casualty lists.

Although Hallothanksmas is mostly about consumption, theft, and violence, it is also marked with ritual meals for the survivors during which the liturgy of the word is to share gory narratives about past and anticipated surgeries and illnesses. Turkey and dressing are just not complete without a look at everyone’s laparotomy, appendectomy, and open-heart-surgery scars and detailed accounts of the children’s latest bowel movements.

But soon all this must end with the beginning of Mardi Gras and its joyful excesses and proud public exhibitions of projectile emesis.

And let The People say “Woo! Woo!” as they bow their heads reverently before their MePhones.

-30-

The Insolent Gas Pump - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Insolent Gas Pump

In the first episode of Get Smart (in glorious black-and-white) Agent Maxwell Smart’s shoe begins ringing like a solid old Bell telephone while he is at a concert (as in music, not existential yowling). The shoe-phone gag, complete with a large rotary dial, was sustained over the life of the series, along with many other logical and illogical gadgets.

Gadgets are fun – telephones, typewriters, Italian Army knives, illuminated magnifiers, barometers, cuckoo clocks, can openers, self-changing record players, the sort of technology that knows its place and doesn’t give itself airs.

But civilization comes to a skidding Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote stop with talking gas pumps that show movies.

Once upon a time when you wanted gas for your car you stopped at the filling station and a nice man wearing a Texaco shirt and a bowtie (miss you, George) filled your car’s tank and checked under the hood, whatever checking under the hood meant. In illo tempore a gallon of gas cost about the same as a cup of coffee, and, come to think of it, still does.

But now you have to get out of the car, produce a plastic card, and negotiate with the pump according to questions and instructions legible on the screen only when the sun is at exactly the right angle, usually around dawn on the the summer solstice.

And then the gas pump puts on a moving picture show. First, there’s the weather. Snow? I don’t think so. But the next day there was snow.

The other day there was a trivia quiz, followed some gossip about Miley Kardashian or somebody like that who’s going to marry the king of Crete, I think.

There was no Roadrunner cartoon or a John Wayne, so what’s the point of a talking gas pump with movies?

But here’s where things get awkward – you find yourself talking back to the gas pump.

This is one of those, like, you know, existential moments, and, like, when you pause midway through the journey of life and find yourself in a gloomy forest of gas pumps (it’s in Dante if you want to look it up).

When you find yourself arguing with a gas pump, you’ve reached an existential whatchamacallit.

Look, on my home planet you just don’t converse with gas pumps. Toasters, maybe. Thermostats, rarely, and only on general topics, like the weather.

But never gas pumps.

Gas pumps, because they light up and show you talking pictures, are like the tenant’s wife in Barchester Towers who now has a piano in the parlour and so feels free to address an archdeacon at the squire’s garden party as if they were social equals.

We just can’t have that.

The next time the gas pump talks to me I’m going to keep my responses polite but just this side of curt.

You know Curt; we all went to school together.

Talking gas pumps. Harrumph. What next – will the coffee maker begin exchanging gossip with the microwave?

-30-

"Found a Dead Body This Mornin' Early" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Found a Dead Body This Mornin’ Early”

Rainy and cold. Breakfast at the café
Early. Warm inside. Windows all steamy
Still dark. That first cup of thank-God coffee
Sausages, eggs, and wheat toast on the way

An old friend walks in. Hangs up his wet coat
“Coffee, please. Pancakes.”
                                                  “Are you off to work?
How about that early project?”
                                                  “Naw, I’m done

Think I’ll go home and hit the recliner;
Found a dead body this mornin’ early”

The Talking Gas Pump Down at the Conoco - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Premium Leaded, Leaded, News, and Weather -
The Talking Gas Pump Down at the Conoco

The talking gas pump down at the Conoco
“Please enter your zip code and press the pound”
Says the temp will be thirty tomorrow
“Will this purchase be credit or debit?”

And that snow is a possibility
“Please remove nozzle and select product”
And that we must watch the road conditions
“Begin fueling now (beep beep beep beep beep)”

In a whisper:

But that’s the number 6 pump saying so,
And that one acts all weird in Bible class

The Plane, the Mist, and the Moon - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Plane, The Mist, and the Moon

An evening walk: a plane, its vapour trails
All golden in the setting sun, sails west
A rising mist on darkening fields below
Creeps Grendel-ish along the forest line

And framed in branches skeletal, the moon
Observes and rules all in the chilling dusk
Without a wind dry oak leaves stir about
And then are still again, and no one knows

Disparate thoughts on a quiet evening walk
Along with the airplane, the mist, the moon

On an Inscription from Katya to Gary in a Pushkin Anthology Found in a Used-Book Sale - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On an Inscription from Katya to Gary

in a Pushkin Anthology Found in a Used-Book Sale

Whatever happened to Katya and Gary?
Their names appear in an anthology
Of Pushkin in a nifty Everyman
Astray on a table of orphaned books

One hopes they read those sweet words each to each
Over Blue Mountain in a coffee shop
Forgetting to feed the parking meter
While planning lives of meaning, deep and rich

Or is each but a memory to the other -
Whatever happened to Katya and Gary?

Advent Remains Unoccupied - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Advent Remains Unoccupied

Advent remains at peace, unoccupied
There are no Advent trees to buy or steal
No seasonally-discounted lingerie
No Advent hymns background the lite-beer ads

At Mass: a wreath, a candle every week
And music set to God, not to the sales;
The missal now begins again, page one
And through the liturgy so too do we

Almost no one notices this season, and thus
Advent remains at peace, unoccupied

Dreams Ride the Rails like Hoboes from the Past - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Empty, Rusting Boxcar

This day will be just like so many others
An empty rusting boxcar creaking and grinding
Along behind other rusting boxcars
And followed by yet more rusting boxcars

Along a railway line from nowhere to nowhere
Across far plains, dry, featureless, and void
Dreams ride the rails like hoboes from the past
But they never seem to arrive anywhere

An empty rusting boxcar creaking and grinding
This night will be just like so many others

Historic Presidential Tweets

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The President Tweeted his Outrage

The tweeter of the free world tweets:
Speak loudly and carry a big tweet
54-40 or tweet
We have nothing to tweet but tweet itself

The twitteral of democracy
Ask not what your tweetry can do for you
We must dare to be tweet
The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the tweet

Government of the tweet, by the tweet, for the tweet
I know in my heart that man is tweet

But now - the tweet stops here

(In context “tweet” and “twitter” might be copyrighted terms, although just why anyone would copyright baby noises is a concept that eludes the thoughtful.)