A Doctor Seuss-Free Graduation Poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On a Morning in June – a Doctor Seuss-Free Graduation Poem

The earth is all before me: with a heart
Joyous, nor scar’d at its own liberty,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.

- Wordsworth, Prelude, I.15-19

Soon you’ll depart for your own pilgrimage,
Seafaring through the life God has given you,
To the golden Canterbury of your heart,
Along the sunlit road you’ve chosen to walk,
A pilgrimage, perhaps, to Orwell’s dusty room,
Or deep into the mind of Thomas More
Or far-off Saint James of the Field of Stars,
Or sea-passages swift to Denmark’s shores,
Or fields of sonnets singing in the dawn -
All these you’ll find along your pilgrim road.

Take then, your haversack, and neatly pack
Your book, your song, your dream, a change of clothes
(Your dreams are happier when you wear dry socks)
A prayer that your parsoun will write for you
A cup, a bowl, a pocketknife, a pen;
And do take care to pack those useful words
Learned, shaped, and sharpened, polished from your youth:
The baby-sounds for supper, sandwich, cat,
The childhood sounds for play and your best friend,
Then words from Mom and words from books - and words from  
     you.

Words flown by you in dreams like sunlit sails
Then shaped again in pencil or in ink
And flung in hope upon a waiting leaf
Words made by you for honest purposes
And never employed in wicked deceit,
For thieves might steal your book, your song, your hopes,
And time decay your purposes and strength
But your own words, oh, yes, your good, strong words,
Like an old pair of boots will see you through
To your heart’s desire at your journey’s end.

Existential Ants - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Someone mentioned existential angst the other day. At first I misread “existential angst” as “existential ants,” and so I dedicate this doggerel (why is there never catteral?) to all of you who suffer existential angst or existential ants:

Existential Ants

All creepy ants are existential ants
If ants across your old blue jeans advance
And bite into your tender skin by chance
You leap into an existential dance

And swear profane, wild, existential chants
Your good companions look at you askance
Each with a wondering existential glance
They seem to be in an existential trance

As you flail among the flowering plants
Because of those wicked existential ants!

Attack of the Robot Disposable Plastic Cups - column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Attack of the Robot Disposable Plastic Cups

A fast-food joint in California features a robot burger-flipper-robot-thingie (“Mustard, Will Robinson!”) that grills 300 hamburgers a day. A human short-order cook must marvel at the concept of only 300.

The restaurant says that no humans are losing jobs because of automation, and given the robot’s leisurely pace that’s probably true.

Any true burger-meister will want only a human cook, Clyde or Maria or Junior or Jorge or Bobbie-Ann, laughing and joking, building a burger with one hand while making coffee with the other, and at the apex of culinary creation calling out your number with a voice reminiscent of one of Bertie Wooster’s brassy aunts, loud enough to call the cattle home across the Sands of Dee.

The robot is not going to approach your table with a coffee refill, pop chewing gum, tell a joke, or ask you how your day is because it’s not programmed to move from its assigned spot on the floor and in any event is broken down again.

No robots, thank you, either in the fast-foodery or in the big-box store; there are no ethics or economy in firing a loyal, long-time local worker in order to lose money on an expensive gadget that never functions as it should and which requires constant maintenance and adjustment while the customers, tired of waiting, drift away to stores staffed by humans.

On the other hand, or grasping robotic arm, the manager of a taco stop in Chicago stabbed one of his employees in an argument over a woman. Possibly a robot worker would not flirt the boss’s girlfriend: “Hey, good-looking, do you ever go out with Chinese robots who dig Microsoft and The Big Bang Theory?”

The Scottish parliament has banned single-use coffee cups, a menace to the environmental purity of the highlands often related in iambic tetrameter in Sir Walter Scott’s yarns. In The Lady of the Lake the real crime of Roderick Dhu is not that he murdered a fellow knight in a sghian dubh-free zone and betrayed his king but because he drank his morning dram of whisky (with a frothy layer of latte and lightly dusted with cinnamon) from a plastic cup.

And then threw it away. Gasp!

This ban on nefarious plastic and paper cups applies only to parliament buildings for the present, saving the heather from the depredations of 450,000 cups a year. Given that Scottish parliamentarians drink 450,000 cups of coffee and tea each year, hardworking Angus in Dundee must wonder what his elected representatives do except sit around and quiver from atrial fibrillation.

The Scottish parliament has also appointed a high-level commission to study (translation: vacations under the guise of fact-finding missions) the elimination of the scourge of other fast-food disposables from Scottish society.

All good Scots still mourn the loss of Stirling Castle in 1304 to an attacking English force better armed with semi-automatic paper cups, wall-breaking plastic clamshells, and unregistered drinking straws.

From California to Scotland the theme seems to be the betterment of the world through the eradication of human workers and plastic cups. This continues the theme that since gasoline comes from a pump (now with a little television screen), electricity from a socket in the wall, and milk from the market, we don’t need those nasty, polluting oil wells, generating stations, and farms.

Once the purge is accomplished, no one will ever again be in want, and whales (vegetarian whales, of course) will frolic in the Sacramento River and in the Solway Firth.

-30-

School Websites - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

School Websites

A solution driven technology
Committee…paying it forward…globally
Competitive…peace poster…this flu season
We have had extra reminders in place

To wash hands and be contentious1 of spreading
Germs…child-centered learning…preparing your child
For the twenty-first century…a vibrant
And diverse living-learning environment

A cross-section of the district’s stakeholders

And, as ever,

Home of the Fighting Something-or-Others


1"Contentious of spreading germs" is the wording on the site during 'flu season.

A Modest Celebration of the Dipthong - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Modest Celebration of the Dipthong

A dipthong - this is not a foolish man
Inappropriately dressed for sea or sand
Nor yet a verbal dipping, nor a thong
Nor yet a tropic river that flows along

A dipthong is two vowels in harmony
One with another dancing gracefully
Without a consonant to interrupt
Through a harsh, hinging sound that’s too abrupt

The poorly called but sweetly sounded dipthong
Is just another name for a little song

The Rodent vs. the Reptile - column

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Rodent vs. the Reptile

No, no, I’m not talking about the latest squabble at an office meeting.

Recently a couple of those roadside chain giganto gas ‘n’ gulp ‘n’ gorge places got into a legal tiff about one’s reptile logo looking too much like the other’s rodent logo.

Since neither establishment serves rodents or reptiles as takeout, what’s the point?

As Al said on the radio, if a driver can’t tell the difference between a giant rodent and a giant reptile, maybe he shouldn’t be driving at all.

Indeed, if the health department were to find rodents or reptiles in the food service spaces, a Godzilla of citations would be released into the wilds of the sandwich kiosks.

Another point of contention is that the rodent people accused the reptile people of copying the rodent people by bragging about their clean restrooms. That makes no sense. One can’t imagine any establishment advertising with, “Come on in; our restrooms are vile and disgusting!”

Of course no one’s restrooms would be vile and disgusting if The People, bless them, didn’t trash them constantly with populist incontinence.

The rodent people and the reptile people – those sound like new categories for a reality show. The competitions could be parking-lot drag races, the highest-decibel screaming children, and map-and-compass navigation of the souvenir area. The losing team would be voted to spend a night, without either weapons or anti-witch powder, in the truck stop restroom across the street, the one with the cologne dispenser because there’s nothing that says lot lizard magnet like cologne from a truck stop restroom.

According to Wookiepedia (or something like that), one of the rodent locations features “120 fueling positions, 83 toilets, 31 cash registers, 4 Icee machines, and 80 fountain dispensers.” All that is mildly interesting, but a cafeteria offering of 83 toilets hardly makes the place a vacation destination.

Texas has put a lot of miles (or maybe those godless Napoleonic kilometres) on the tires from the Ye Olden Days gas station along the two-lane, with a couple of pumps, a screen door, fizzy drinks in a tank of ice water, ceiling fans stirring the flypaper strips in the desert heat, and a couple of old geezers sitting on a wooden bench out front, whittling and watching the decades pass. Now we have sanitized giant rodent and giant reptile gargantua plazas with air-conditioning and 80 toilets and lawsuits.

Progress, I guess.

-30-

"We Will Remember Them" - Column, Memorial Day, 2018

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

"We Will Remember Them"

Memorial Day is said to have begun during the Civil War as Decoration Day, when the fresh graves of the war dead were decorated with flowers in their memory. Numerous towns, north and south, claim to have begun the tradition of decorating the graves of all soldiers of both sides. Wherever this noble custom began, honoring those who served is what civilized nations do.

On Memorial Day we still honor the loyal departed, those who died in war and those who passed on in peace.

Last month, a C130 of the Puerto Rico Air National Guard went down with the loss of all its crew.

These fine young men and their aircraft recently served our nation throughout the Caribbean in evacuation and supply duties for months after Hurricane Maria.

As we now know, this aging C130 was being flown to Tucson to be scrapped. Some sources say the plane was 40 years old; some say 50 and some say 60. In any event, the plane was older than any of its crew.

Maybe it’s always been true that this nation sends its finest young men and women to fight contemporary wars with the leftovers from past wars.

Those young men are:

Major José Rosado, pilot

Major Carlos Serra, navigator

1st Lieutenant David Albandoz, co-pilot

Senior Master Sgt. Jan Paravisini, mechanic

Master Sgt. Jean Audriffred

Master Sgt. Mario Braña, flight engineer

Master Sgt. Víctor Colón

Master Sgt. Eric Circuns, loadmaster

Senior Airman Roberto Espada

We did not know these young men who died for us, but let us praise them now, and honor them, and let us remember these three things about them:

1. All of these young men served in the Air National Guard – you know, that safe duty. For decades some who never made the first day of recruit training have claimed that the Reserves and the National Guard are easy billets, a nice soft way of avoiding hazardous duty.

Rupert Brooke wrote in 1914 “If I should die, think only this of me / There is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.”

Well, we can write that there are lots of corners of lots of foreign fields that are forever American Reserves and National Guard.

2. All of these young men were millennials – you know, that generation of delicate snowflakes who just lay around the house playing video games and who won’t demonstrate initiative. The reality is that our military, our emergency and police services, our workforce – they’re millennials, the generation that came of age at the turn of the century and who now are entering early middle age.

3. The nine who died were not eligible to vote in federal elections. Residents of Puerto Rico have been, since 1917, citizens of the United States, and yet they may not vote in federal elections. These nine young men, as part of their oath of enlistment, pledged personal loyalty to their president, and they could not, by law, vote for their president. They were not permitted to vote for the government of the nation for which they died in active military service.

We should do something about that.

I return to Senior Airman Roberto Espada – how old was he? 21? 22? – who is survived only by his grandmother, his meemaw. We can infer that his meemaw raised him. And she raised a good young man. And he won’t be going home to her. And yet some are pleased to dismiss Roberto as a millennial, a snowflake. His meemaw knows better, and all true Americans know better too.

Shakespeare, 400 years ago, wrote about young Roberto. In Act V of Macbeth:, a warrior who has fought against the tyrant Macbeth is told that his young son – let us call him Roberto – was killed in the battle. Macduff says to the grieving father:

“Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt:
He only lived but till he was a man”

Senior Airman Roberto Espada only lived until he was a man.

On Memorial Day let us remember him, his crewmates, and all the loyal departed with Lawrence Binyon’s fine words:


They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning
We will remember them.

-30-

When We Were Sailors - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When We Were Sailors

To the tune of Detroit Diesels

When we were sailors we seldom thought about
Being sailors. We thought about, well, girls
And happenin’ tunes from AFVN
‘Way down the river in happenin’ Saigon

We thought about cars and beaches and girls
And would a swing ship bring any mail today
In big red nylon sacks of envelopes
Love postmarked in a fantasy, The World

We thought about autumn and home and girls
While sandbag stacking and C-Rat snacking
We thought about being clean and dry again
While pooping and snooping in Cambodia

When we were sailors we thought about our pals
And what they were, and who
                                                   before the dust-offs flew

Right Wings and Left Wings - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Right Wings and Left Wings

Well, yes, there are wings, right wings and left wings -
If a bird is missing a wing, right or left
It cannot fly, it cannot lift away
From the cat-haunted lawn, and so is eaten

There are water-wings, and buffalo wings
(Although buffalo don’t really have wings)
And in the cafeteria chicken-ring-things
And other metaphors that just won’t fly

But you and I, we both belong to God
And not to a wing (that would be quite odd)

Thirteen Reasons Why Not - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Thirteen Reasons Why Not

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny.

But what we put into it is ours.

 

-Dag Hammarskjold

1. God made you; you can never be replaced
2. God made you for some purpose – live to find it
3. Someone is blessed each day in knowing you
4. You must live so that others may live
5. Someone desperately needs your kindness right now
6. You haven’t yet written your book, your story, your song
7. When you offer up your suffering, you help others
8. Children running barefoot through the flowers of spring
9. Children running barefoot through the leaves of autumn
10. Dachshund puppies. And leaves. And flowers. And children
11. Coffee and a talk with a good friend
12. Breakfast and the Sunday morning funnies
13. That empty pew God has saved just for you



from Coffee and a Dead Alligator to Go, 2017

Special and Awesome Spring Concert in the Parish Hall - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Special and Awesome Spring Concert in the Parish Hall

Well, gosh, thank you for being here today
I am honored to be the conductor
Of this very special and awesome group
So let me introduce them one by one
To this special and awesome audience
It’s been an awesome season, and we’re glad
You could share this moment with us today
We’d like to give a special shout-out to
(Name and name) for making this wonderful space
Available to all of us today
As you know this is the last performance
Of the season, and the last here for (name)
Who is being transferred to Albuquerque
And we want to wish her well; she has been
A cornerstone-rock-heart of our little group
And also for (name) who is retiring
After thirty years with (name-name, inc)
And is looking forward to spending time
With his family and traveling about
With his awesome and patient wife (name-name)
And also with his awesome and patient dogs
Although of course he would never say that they
Are more awesome than his sweet wife ha-ha
You will notice that our program today
Features a diversity of pieces to appeal
To all sorts of tastes because the pieces
We have selected in their diversity
Are meant to appeal to all sorts of tastes
Oh, wait, did I say that already ha-ha
Because we all believe that music speaks
To the hearts of all in their special ways
Because music is the language of all
From Tchaikovsky and Wagner to Elvis
From the stuffiness of grand old Vienna
To ‘way-cool happenin’ New Orleans
Or as they like to say down there Naw-lins
Ha-ha music is the language of all
Because it is inclusive and diverse
And speaks to all our hearts with love
And, like, you know, stuff, so now we begin
With some traditional classic pieces
And then some popular tunes you can tap
Your toes along to, and then at the end
We will enjoy a good ol’ sing-along
And maybe some audience participation
Ha-ha but we’ll let that be a surprise
Our first piece now is by Paganini
Who was neither a pagan nor a ninny
Ha-ha so let me give you’re a little background
On this piece…

A Brief Discourse on the Subject of Standing or Not Standing for the National Anthem at Sporting Events That You and I Can't Afford to Attend Anyway

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Brief Discourse on the Subject of Standing or Not Standing for the National Anthem

at Sporting Events That You and I Can’t Afford to Attend Anyway

You don’t have to stand up, but I wish you would -
Standing up for the flag is standing up
For each other, me for you, you for me
But if you don’t, forgive me anyway

You don’t have to stand up, but I wish you would -
Because some fifty years ago That Man’s
Heel spurs kept him from crawling through the mud
With us; he’s not much of a stand-up guy

You don’t have to stand up, but if you do –
I would be humbly honored to stand with you

Gap Year for the Children of the Poor - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Gap Year for the Children of the Poor

Just cruising through the endless sunny days
Along a rainforest river lingering
Hatless, shirtless, catching some serious rays
Listening to the national radio

A practical internship in cultural studies
Interacting with the authentic locals
And sampling their authentic cuisines
And learning so much from authentic them

The authentic locals had much to teach us,
And they did - during our gap year in Viet-Nam

We Do Not Burn Books in America - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

We Do Not Burn Books in America

We do not burn books in America
We just ignore them, for we light our nights
And burn away our individual souls
Upon an altar green, clean plastic grass

Come together as one unto the lights
The concept of the tablets now writ large
An electronic scoreboard – and if we’re good
We’ll see our snaggly grins all ten feet tall

Eighty-thousand dollars of education
Beaming civilization six nights each year

Snake Interruptedruptedruptedrupted - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snake  Interruptedruptedruptedrupted - A Song of Spring

Our merry springtime is a glorious feast
Of joyful sights and scents and happy sounds,
Of breezes turning warmly from the east
Of bustling bees winging their flowery rounds

Above, around, and through a world of green
In dreams of life that move the seasons along
Where each day’s sunrise halos a Creation scene
And every blossom is its own soft song

But the sweetest sound echoing through the glades
Is a snake being shredded by the lawnmower’s blades

A Pastoral Scene (without firearms) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Pastoral Scene (without firearms)

A fine wine’s not for us; we want cheap red
In paper cups beneath the apple trees
with cheese and bread upon the grasses spread
And you singing along each merry breeze

This fine day’s made for us; we want to kiss
Creation as we kiss each other’s lips
In celebration of sweet summer bliss
While soft away the dreamy twilight slips

Our fine moon’s rising, silvering the air -
She tells us we have kisses yet to share

Ceremonies of Innocence - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Ceremonies of Innocence

“The ceremony of innocence is drowned”

-W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

The ceremonies of innocence live,
All of them: youthful lovers holding hands
Bees watering beneath a dripping tap
Good farmers tending summer’s ripening fields

Things fall apart, but gather we the bits
And carefully love them together again
With cups of coffee, lines of verse, kind words
And all the liturgies of worship and hope

The ceremonies of innocence live:
They mend the time through the blessings we give

A Makeshift Shrine - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Makeshift Shrine

 

for those who mourn...

Teddy bears ribboned to a chain-link fence,
Plastic-wrapped flowers stacked like compost,
Dime-store candles flickering in the exhaust
Of passing mini-vans. The inanity
Of filler-language falls, descends upon
The shattered souls of the barely alive,
The dead cliches’ of well-planned camera-grief:
“Our hearts and thoughts go out to you.”
What does that mean? Nothing but conventional noise
For generations of lovers and mourners
Long-ago looted of reality,
Programmed with state-sanctioned hyperbole,
And mourners now are left with nothing but
An existential howl against the light,
Sodium-vapor upon broken glass,
While strident Men of Destiny
There rake for votes among the ashes of death.


from The Road to Magdalena, 2012

Negotiating with Honeybees - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Negotiating with Honeybees

The squirrel makes a fuss - he must discuss
Drink-sharing with the thirsty honeybees
Who hover greedily above the bowl
And claim all water rights for bees alone

The squirrel pleas with “Please!” to all the bees;
In conclave met they buzz, and grant the fuzz-
Y neighbor limited let to get wet
If when drinking his fill he holds real still

And the bees’ pet human has come and gone –
He leaves them water, then leaves them alone

An Open Poem to His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales, Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Open Poem to

His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales,

Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order

Shave

Matthias - a Substitute Teacher - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Matthias – a Substitute Teacher

Perhaps Matthias is the patron saint
Of substitute teachers – called in rather late
And sent where he had never been before
Unsure of what might be expected of him

Without even a book of lesson plans
But ever willing to give it a go
To face a crowd incurious, hostile
Demanding of him: “What are you doing here?

Mostly ignored, his sign-in sheet misplaced
Late-called, but still, as he was called
                                                                he went

Bush-Hogging - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

(Mostly a remembrance of my father; I am very happy that bush-hogging [and milking cows, and plowing, and planting, and…] is not a part of my adult life.)

Bush-Hogging

Light fog, dense air - how should one think of them
The sun – he seems to be holding his breath
Until, oh, nine or so, when he exhales
Soul-sucking heat upon the steaming earth

The Massey-Ferguson sits patiently
Through all its dawn-lit diagnostic chores:
Check the oil, check the gas, and lube the points
Safety checks all ‘round before the mowing begins

Old hat, old gloves, old boots, a fresh cigar
And old eyes focused on a field afar



(Bush-Hog is a brand of farm-tractor-mounted rotary mowing machines and other types of farm equipment. Bush-Hog enjoys an excellent reputation, and so to mow fields and pastures, even with another brand, is referred to as bush-hogging)

The Bird Mark 7 Respirator - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Okay, a poem about a machine is suspiciously redolent of Socialist Realism, but I’m not ready to write an ode to a tractor factory.

The Bird Mark 7 Respirator

In memory of Forrest Bird, who saved the lives of millions

A little Bird, singing all through the night
A plastic box of green mechanicals
Its soft, subtle hiss-click there breathing life
Into and through the wreckages of boys

Americans, mostly, Vietnamese
Koreans, Cambodians, Lao, Hmong
And one who might have been a Russian (shhhhh….) -
The pretty Bird sang in their languages

And when they woke, the soft song that they heard
Was whispered to them by a little green Bird

Thoughts on a Picture of Two Men in Dinner Jackets - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Thoughts on a Picture of Two Men in Dinner Jackets

If they were Of The People they’d tog in tees
The uniform of the Proletariat
To demonstrate their unique specialness
And admire each other’s piercings and tats

Sitting at a bar in dinner jackets
Without any irony, just two men
And talking with each other, not to ‘phones
Quiet voices – so totally not cool

Having a few after a semi-do
They’ve been noticed1 - not Good Comrades, these two


1“Your attitude’s been noticed.” – Commissar to Yuri in Doctor Zhivago

A Study of Situational Poverty in the Rural South - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Study of Situational Poverty in the Rural South

Raggedy barefoot children in the five and dime
With a Saturday morning quarter each
Plastic toy soldiers, Nazis and Yanks
Or a wind-up car – but that’s a dollar

Whitman adventure books for fifty cents
If nothing this week, then maybe the next
The Call of the Wild, with noble dog Buck
But what about marbles in a little net bag?

Tables of treasures at the variety store
Aladdin’s Cave (with a swept wooden floor)

The All-Seeing I - column. This one's pretty good

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The All-Seeing I

When, Gentle Reader, you open a newspaper or a conversational site on the InterGossip and note that a column, article, poem, or letter-to-the editor begins with that first-person “I,” skipping that item and going on to something else is almost always a good call.

When a written piece of work includes the phrase “When I was in graduate school…” skipping that is always the right thing to do. That one has been in a classroom is irrelevant; we have all sat in classrooms, usually looking at the clock and in silent prayer pleading with the Divinity, “How long, O Lord, how long?!”

Recently your ‘umble scrivener noted on a news site from far away a report about a young man who had spent some time in prison but had now redeemed himself with the gift of music. While he was in prison he rented a guitar for a nominal sum and taught himself to play it.

The redeemed was pleased to talk about himself, his tattoo celebrating his release from prison, his progress in making himself a better person now, his feelings, his soul, and his music.

And then the viewer was treated to him singing one of his original compositions celebrating himself.

Once upon a time your ‘umble scrivener watched in fascinated horror as a king snake fought and then devoured a rattlesnake while the rattlesnake was still alive.

The purported musician’s performance was rather like that, so whiney-nasal in the vocalization, so self-obsessed in the lyrics, and so brutal in the abuse of the chords and the poor guitar that the interest was in how awful (not awesome) an exhibition of narcissism could be.

But, hey, there were thousands of InterGossip hits (sic), so the music was aesthetically pleasing to some.

When the unhappy noises were ended and the segment was closed with the usually filler-language praising this, oh, experience, the thoughtful observer could only note that the redeemed never expressed any concern about those whom he had hurt.

There was a too-common catalogue of crimes in this young person’s life, according to the interviewer, one of which including breaking into an elderly woman’s house and robbing her.

The inspirational singer-songwriter never mentioned her or any of his victims. He made no apologies, he never expressed any regret, he never suggested in any way that he had broken the norms of civilized behavior. He never mentioned having a job

All he discussed was his therapy, his redemption, his music, his vision, his feelings in the incessant I, I, I, me, me, me that so often constitutes public discourse.

Common generational snobbery would dismiss this self-obsessed young person as a millennial, ignoring the salient fact that the good a man does, or the evil that a person does, is not connected with the date of birth. The reality is that most folks born between 1983 and 2001 – the much maligned millennials – now form the core of this nation’s military, police and fire services, medical professionals, and work force. Passing on clichés about millennials is a disservice to our concepts of honor and honesty – after all, almost all our fine young men and women fighting in the deserts are (gasp) millennials.

And, after all, self-obsession is not defined by date of birth; a individual chooses to grow up and kinda / sorta try to act like a man, or he can just sit around and feel sorry for himself.

The first-person voice is sometimes necessary for advancing a narrative, but it is a risky thing to do.

Even so, one would like to hear more first-person voices from those who have done hard time in Afghanistan or with the police or fire services, and not from those who have enjoyed the leisure to learn the guitar on the taxes and labor of those in Afghanistan (did you know that a soldier’s combat pay is taxed?), the fire and police services, and in the sweat of honest work.

-30-

The In-Laws of Other In-Laws Who Happened to be in the Neighborhood and Decided to Stop by for Just a Minute - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The In-Laws of Other In-Laws Who Happened to be in the Neighborhood

and Decided to Stop by for Just a Minute

Oh yeah that’s right we met at now where was it
Uncle Skinny’s funeral now I think that
was now when was that dear? Oh, it
was at Cousin Verlis’ wedding okay
I’m sure stove up from my last surgery
yeah, me an’ Bubba worked the tugboats for years
Then he fired me we lived there for years
but sold the place and we’re still living there
now it was all flooded up there to where
the Baptist Church was so we couldn’t go
they say Interstate Ten’s a mess this summer
we need to go I got to take my pills
that’s why rice farmers just leave their combines
in the field to rust ‘cause the government’s
all mixed up in it I guess there ain’t many
of us left we all grew up together
I got me this new gun now where’s my ‘phone
Oh it’s in the truck I’ll get it
                                                  now here
I can’t make this thing work I know it’s in
my pictures oh there it is wait it’s gone
we need to go I’ve got to take my pills
now was Cousin Skeeter buried with his parents
no wait that was his son joined the Marines
but they kicked him out ‘cause he was no good
we need to go I’ve got to take my pills
now they was both buried in California
I guess I seen ‘em in 1968 last
These chairs is too low I’m all stove up
I don’t know why the government ain’t prepared
For hurricanes they dug this big drainage ditch
But what if the water backs up along it
Then what am I going to do
We need to go I’ve got to take my pills
I ain’t never met a stranger, no, sir
That’s what they always said about me
Now when I was in school if I had said
“computer” they’d-a sure-’nough kicked me out
We didn’t need all that stuff we learnt just fine
We need to go I’ve got to take my pills
(a ten-minute monologue about a couch
goes here) so I ended up buying a new couch
my first job was with Caterpillar but
after ten years he left and went to work
down’t Port Arthur now if you’re ever
down our way be sure to stop by
we’d sure be glad to have you come on by
We need to go I’ve got to take my pills


[The morning’s interrupted projects and chores
Are resumed, but somehow in a milieu
Of existential despair.]

Some Observations on the Habits of the American Cardinal - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Some Observations on the Habits of the American Cardinal

The Cardinal knows that he is a pretty bird
Splendidly attired in feathers bright and gay
He publishes loudly; he will be heard
Among the squawks of mockingbird and jay

He gobbles and scatters husks, rusks, and seeds
In self-indulgent abandonment
He ignores all others in his wants and needs
They’re secular birds; they can take a hint

The Cardinal certainly loves to be seen
At the public feeder in all his pride
Attentive to fashions, and always keen
For the Best Birds to be posed at his side

But then one day

A few remnant feathers, a ripped cardinal’s hat -
He seems to have forgotten the watchful cat


From Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, 2014, available from amazon

"Why Aren't You in Class? Who's Your Teacher?" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Why Aren’t You in Class? Who’s Your Teacher?”

No one seems to care; no one really listens
If you don’t play football, baseball, or basketball
Nobody cares. Most teachers don’t know me
And I don’t know them. We need orange jumpsuits

You can’t ever talk to the principal;
He’s too busy, and if you do, he finds
Something wrong with you, and gives you a sermon
Maybe his Jesus loves me, but he sure doesn’t

The assistant principal doesn’t know us
Or care about us; she just screams at us
Unless you’re an athlete. She likes athletes
Everybody just seems so uncomfortable

Or like they don’t want to be here…

“WHY AREN’T YOU IN CLASS?! WHO’S YOUR TEACHER?!”

Contra William Carlos Williams - a rather boring poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Contra William Carlos Williams

The only realism in art is of the imagination. It is only thus that the work

escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation.

-Spring and All, p. 35

A leaf sometimes might seem to be a bee
Afloat upon the humming summer air
The tiny tree-ness of some greater Tree
Or brolly of a fairy-lady fair

A leaf may be presented as a shield
In chlorophyllic marching order trimmed
Its veins as dents received upon the field
The eye of each woody cell dying and dimmed

But even so

In this, inter-warriors, come not to grief
For in the end, a leaf is still a leaf

Dreamcatchers Along a Navajo Road - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Dreamcatchers Along a Navajo Road

“…the war…often seems to have happened to someone else.”

-C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

A pickup truck beside a Navajo road
Tables of souvenirs, a Thermos of coffee
Clotheslines of dreamcatchers catching the sun
For now; the dreams must wait for sleepless hours

“You were in Viet-Nam,” the old man said
To another old man. No mystery;
He simply took a chance to make a sale
And did, for both had known the Vam Co Tay

Old men along the road, catchers of dreams
Who burned their chances in the long ago

Thoughts of a Man Deferentially Silent During a Conversation Between his Daughter and his Wife - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Thoughts of a Man Deferentially Silent

During a Conversation Between his Daughter and his Wife

How is it that a man can live a long
And happy life in the service of God
And humanity without ever having made
A deep study of the cultivation
Of eyelashes?

0300, and all is not well - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

0300, and all is not well

“…or if we must be wakeful, cheerful…”

-from St. Thomas More’s evening prayer in A Man for all Seasons

Soft, healing sleep now rolls away, away
One’s senses flicker unreliably
The electronic weather panel glows
The CPAP whispers a leaking-air hissssssss

Awake. And why? The day was cruel enough
And now the night reproaches with things done
And things not done, all mixed in raw reproach
Life-choices laughing, mocking, taunting

Perhaps sleepless Macbeth can tell us why
With mirth displaced, all through these haunted hours

When a Plan That Wasn't Made Doesn't Come Together - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When a Plan That Wasn’t Made Doesn’t Come Together

One loves it when a plan that wasn’t made
Doesn’t come together in a hall that wasn’t hired
By a man who was never told to hire
The hall by a committee that never met

And thus the event which was never held
Was not postponed by the man never told
To postpone the event that was never planned
By a committee that never met anywhere

One loves it when a plan that wasn’t made
Leaves one at peace with book and pipe and Scotch

The Tragic Death of a New World Vulture - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Tragic Death of a New World Vulture

Cruisin’ best speed, foot lightly on the gas
But suddenly, alarm, alack, alas!
Around a curve, vultures lunching en masse
(On ‘possum de jour, a rotting, sodden mass)
One panicked bird leaped up to fly and pass
But wobble-crashed into the windshield glass
He bumped, he bounced, he bonked upon his (brass)
His life flailed out among the roadside grass

Off the Beaten Cliche' - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Off the Beaten Cliché

Upon Reading Literary Reviews

Off the beaten path – is that part of the trail
That was blazed after the door to the future
Was unlocked with the key of somethingness
As an imaginative entrée, hmmmmmmm?

How dangerous it now must be to walk
Beneath that stress-fractured ceiling of glass
Paving the way that was blazed and unlocked
With the key to the future where dreams live

The oppressed voiceless up in champagne class
In resistance to the something-archy

And let The People yawn “iconic”

The Arts Community is Watching You Carefully - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Arts Community

First Member of Social Group to Number Forty Two: “All right, you say you're a poet and you were composing, and you failed to hear Number Ten's greeting.”

Second Member of Social Group, accusingly: “Neglect of social principle.”

Number Six: “Poetry has a social value?

Number Forty Two to Number Six: “You're trying to undermine my rehabilitation! Disrupt my social progress!”

Number Six: “Strange talk for a poet.”

-The Prisoner, “A Change of Mind”

The arts community unmutuals
The individual who dares presume
To work outside The Committee’s deep love
For democratic creativity

The arts community instructs us all
In unison chanting freedom of thought
Painting, writing, and thinking within the lines
As set before us harmoniously

The arts community sets us all free
As long as we are free obediently

Who IS Jack Robinson, Anyway? (But Bob's Your Uncle!) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Who is Jack Robinson, Anyway?

(But Bob’s Your Uncle!)

Before you can say “Jack Robinson”
You’ll want to pause and take another breath
Your heart will beat tum-tum-tiddly-tum times
The earth will rotate on its axis some

Before you can say “Jack Robinson”
You’ll wonder if you brushed your teeth after lunch
The clock will go on strike for four o’clock
The moon will hold her mirror to the sun

Before you can say “Jack Robinson”
You will forget why you meant to say that

Selling Jesus at the Truck Stop - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Selling Jesus at the Truck Stop

A table of Jesus-stuff at the door
A beefish man in gas-station shades
Channeling Chaucer’s Pardoner – he ain't
Never heard of him – in peddling salvation

“It’s for the church. It’s for the missions,” he says
Ignored by most. Then in a mutton moment
He spreads his legs and clutches at his (faith)
Laughing a pelvic thrust at his fellow apostle

A gormless guide to The Golden Shore
Touting tawdries and tidings at the truck stop door

The Weekly Hollering Lady at Tia Linda's Get 'N' Go - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Weekly Hollering Lady at Tia Linda’s Get ‘N’ Go

“I sure like your blowed-up hair!
A lovely day!
A lovely day!
Let’s light a candle for your blowed-up hair!

No ideas for being locked in for a week!
It’s later!
Play with the peacocks and the monkeys yesterday!
Play with the peacocks and the monkeys yesterday!

Well y’all have a blessed day! A blessed day!”

A kind voice from the next booth: “Bless her heart.”

Amen

We Could Ask for King George III Back - column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

We Could Ask for Santa Anna or King George III Back

Last week there was a merry meeting of the democratically-elected Houston I.S.D. school trustees with lots of adults yelling at each other “for the children” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/04/25/wild-night-at-houston-school-board-meeting-as-police-drag-out-protesters/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8bd7fc283371).

The democratically-elected board president, someone wielding a hyphen between her two names, ordered the boardroom cleared so that the people’s business could be continued. Removing the people from the people’s meeting dealing with the people’s business seems contradictory, but when there is disruption this is legal and necessary.

One of the people was shown being cop-pulled along the floor on her aspiration, but since the floor had recently been waxed by the always unappreciated cleaners she suffered only indignity. After a while the two police officers stopped (they seemed to be tired from the exertion of heaving democracy along) and asked the lady if she would like to walk now, and she did, and they helped her up, and life went on.

The thoughtful observer asks himself if any of the unhappy people yelling at their democratically-elected trustees, including the trustee with the hyphen, bothered to vote for or against them in the previous school board election.

Y’r ‘umble scrivener recuses himself from commenting on the specifics of the people’s business being conducted, but will address the matter of government by guerilla theatre.

Americans seem to have developed a tendency to try to govern by yelling instead of by voting. Only about 50% of the electorate – those people who are registered to vote - participated in the last several presidential elections. Democrats, Republicans, and all those little inhaled-too-much-weird-stuff parties yell and scream and ALL-CAPS on the InterGossip, but they don’t vote. Perhaps they are too busy yelling at or along with the fat boys on a.m. radio to do so.

Local school board elections are more important than presidential elections, because democratically-elected school boards are the people’s democratically-elected trustees, charged by the people with establishing local school policy in all matters, from curriculum to choosing the brand of floor wax for the people to be pulled along upon, and funding the people’s schools by assessing, taxing, and spending millions of dollars of tax revenues. School boards also hire and fire everyone, from the superintendent to the nice folks (always underpaid and underappreciated) who wax the floors so that the people may be pulled along them with minimal let, hindrance, or friction.

And yet voting in a local school board election is a lonely experience.

There is much babble about the decay of the public school system in this nation, but a prior point is that something that does not exist cannot decay. There has never been a public school system from sea to shining sea; there is only a mess of sometimes conflicting federal laws, state laws, judicial rulings, and policies set by local, democratically-elected boards of trustees.

The local trustees we elect do the metaphorical heavy lifting. While the Texas legislature swoons at the cooings of that seductive foreign publisher who pushes the goofy textbooks and goofier standardized tests inflicted on Texas children, the people’s democratically-elected board of trustees must make our children’s education function in spite of conflicting laws and rulings and edicts.

We the people are those “government schools” sneered at by the gossips because we the people are the government. It says so in the federal constitution and in the state constitution. If a school is bad it is because we the people make it so by voting for inept trustees or by not voting at all.

Our ancestors rid themselves of kings because they felt that the people knew their own needs best. To fail to vote is to surrender that individual power our ancestors sacrificed to give to us.

There is dignity in the exercise of power through the vote; there is only embarrassment in waving a MePhone around while yelling like an ill-raised brat.

In Texas, a very few good men and women are freely choosing the governance of their schools by secret ballot through the 5th of May. There aren’t many people voting, only the best, and you can choose to be one of the best.

-30-

A Movie Review over Coffee at Tia Linda's Get 'N' Go - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Movie Review over Coffee at Tia Linda’s Get ‘N’ Go

V: “There was this police chief and the cartels
beheaded his wife so it was vengeance
ride time and then they raided this house with
armored personnel carriers and 7.63

machine guns and stuff and BOOM! and there was
heads in the walls ‘cause they’d hid the bodies
in the walls man it was gross and then they
sneaked up on the super-secret cartel

bunkers and silently killed all the guards…”

R: “Well, I guess I got to get to work now…”

The Wheels on the Quantum Bus Go 'Round or Not, But Not Simultaneously - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Wheels on the Quantum Bus

Go ‘Round or Not, But Not Simultaneously

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
Is certainly not uncertain at all
Or, rather, to avoid the negative
The certainty is that no one gets it

Not even the skilled quantum mechanic
That thoughtful hermitian operator
On his symmetry-breaking creeper beneath
A cosmological Schrodinger’s Cat

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle
Doesn’t rhyme with orange or anything else

(Observation Changes) The End

Cerulean - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Cerulean

Once upon a time
I calligraphed “cerulean” -
Now I just write “blue”

Friends Don't Let Friends Sing Barbershop - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Friends Don’t Let Friends Sing Barbershop

For the CBC Anchormen’s Quintet

Take the keys (of C and G), call a cab
Take the ‘phone from the moaning baritone
Bury their sheet music beneath a slab
And chase from the bass the inverted cone

Hot coffee to purge demons a capella
With fervent prayers to our merciful Lord
Please save each and every harmonic fella
And free them from the ringing chord

Oh, call a priest, call a mom, call a cop
Because friends don’t let friends sing barbershop

Most Things End in Sorrow - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Most Things End in Sorrow

The happiest marriages we’ll ever know
End in death; the unhappy marriages
Decay in cycles of disappointment
And fall apart in court on a working day

A glorious autumn ends in blue-ice winds
A favorite childhood toy is forever lost
An anticipated promotion is denied
And golden youth in hospice slips away

But morning’s cup of courage freshens hope,
And the world is optimistically green

Oh, Let You NOT Show me a Cute picture - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Oh, Let You Not Show me a Cute Picture…

Oh, let me show you this cute picture
I found on the internet; it’s right here
Oh, wait, it was right here; let me find it
You’re going to like it, just the thing you like

Here it is - no, wait, that’s not it; now where
Is it; let me just scroll down here - no, wait,
Maybe I should just scroll the other way
I know you’re going to like this, really

I know you’re in a hurry but this is cute
Now isn’t this just the funniest thing…?

No?

A Copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse Remaindered from

the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Public Libraries

This happy gift of 1939
Rescued from the good comrades’ loving fires
From the liberation of censorship
From the gentle criminalization of thought

This little book and its happy, dancing lines
Crafted with thought and care and art and love
A celebration of civilization
Oh, save it, read it, love it, smuggle it

Because

More dangerous to tyrants than weapons
Are the poems of a people living free

Cinco de Mayo - column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Cinco de Mayo

When in the middle of the 19th century France decided that the conquest of Mexico would compensate for the loss of its previous North American empire, the Austrian empire provided one of their extra archdukes to serve as a sock-puppet emperor. Both the French and the Austrian governments expected to enrich themselves by looting, exploiting, and taxing Mexicans, a program which anticipated our own Internal Revenue Service.

President Lincoln was opposed to the scheme, not from any love of the Mexican people but from fear of French intervention on the Confederate side in the Civil War. There is a possibility that the Confederacy meant to seize Cuba from the Spanish and create an empire centered on the Gulf of Mexico, a Southern Mare Nostrum. Beyond all this, the Spanish, the English, and the French were already involved in Mexico and the Gulf for their own purposes. And beyond yet all this, Mexico, after years of civil war, was divided, with many considering government by the French better than ongoing violence, starvation, and economic collapse. Some of the quarreling Mexican factions invited France and Archduke Maximilian to Mexico.

In sum, everyone was against everyone.

The French army had not lost a battle in over fifty years (anyone who dismisses the courage, character, and aggressiveness of the French soldier is ignorant of history), and through superior organization, technology, and numbers, and poor intelligence from its spies, assumed that they would be victorious in Mexico.

Marching from Vera Cruz to Mexico City in the spring of 1862, the French were assured by spies and propagandists that the citizens of Puebla de los Angeles would welcome them with flowers.

Instead of flowers, Mexicans welcomed the French army with archaic Brown Bess muskets sold them by the English long before as war surplus. The Mexican victory was wholly unexpected, and the whole French invasion timetable had to be re-set.

The invaders reorganized, and with reinforcements and craftier leadership occupied Mexico City within a year and set the Hapsburg upon his throne for a brief reign that ended before a firing squad in 1867.

The theme of this first Battle of Puebla (there were two others) on the 5th of May, 1862 was that it showed that a poorly-organized but determined Mexican militia and populace could defeat a modern European army. This gave the people hope, and led eventually to their victory over the occupiers in 1867.

Maximilian was a liberal in the old-fashioned sense, and proposed reforms for agricultural laborers and the poor which in the end could not be carried out. Too bad Juarez had him shot instead of employing him; Maximilian had restructured the Austrian navy into a real battle force, and could have done the same for the Mexican navy.

On the fifth of May this year we have important elections in Texas, free elections. Maximilian, a monarchist, disapproved of government of the people, but Benito Juarez, a republican-with-a-small-r, said people should show up and vote for their leaders. He would be disappointed to see that most Texans don’t vote at all. They listen to the a.m. radio boys and complain about their several governing entities, but seem to think that self-government is a spectator sport.

Maximilian would have been okay with that sort of passivity.

We have many reasons to think about Cinco de Mayo this year.

-30-

We Lay Our Coats Down at the Feet of Saul - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

We Lay Our Coats Down at the Feet of Saul

We lay our coats down at the feet of Saul,
And stones we hurl, curses and stones:
                                                                libtard,
     Fascist, snowflake, reactionary, slime
     Commie, demoncrat, shrillary, trumptard,

     Republicrap, boomer, millennial,
     Commie, moron, alt-right, leftie, scumbag,
     Crayon-people, pansy, tape-worm, muppet, dweeb,
     Sock-puppet, Russkie, nazi, trash, and creep

And thus we deny the Cornerstone when
We lay our coats down at the feet of Saul

The Most Common Forms of the Scantron®©™ are the Shakespearean, the Spenserian, and the Petrarchan - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Most Common Forms of the Scantron®©™ are

the Shakespearean, the Spenserian, and the Petrarchan

No lovesick lad ever poured out his heart
To a Scantron®©™ card and its suave machine
Posed seductively in brushed aluminum
In a smoky corner of the faculty commons

Or with a thundering Number Two scribed
A manifesto that menaced the world
(But bubbled carefully within the squares)
And ground it through a Scantron®©™ 888

For indeed

Moses brought not Scantron®©™ down from Sinai
To teach God’s laws through an electric eye

TITANIC's Laugh Track - Rhyming Doggerel

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Titanic’s Laugh Track

Is there a man so cruel, so hard of heart
So like unto the treacherous Macbeth
So bloody, so bleak, his soul so broken apart
That he cannot laugh when Jack freezes to death?

Big Linda's Grab 'N' Go II - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Big Linda’s Grab ‘N’ Go II

A poor old man chants through his crumb-y beard:

(In iambic dimeter)

“The WORLD has CHANGED”
“The WORLD has CHANGED”

(sometimes unstressed-unstressed-unstressed-to-stressed,
Even though his biscuit is not impressed)

“The world has CHANGED”
“The world has CHANGED”

(and back to iambic dimeter)

“The WORLD has CHANGED”
“The WORLD has CHANGED”

While at another table a man shouts
Importantly into his busy-ness ‘phone:

“SO DO YOU WANT TO PAY YOUR MONTHLY BILLS
OFF EACH MONTH LIKE I DO? THIS IS A GREAT…”
(He pauses for a bite of his Big Linda
Braekfast [sic] Special)…“OPPORTUNITY
FOR YOU I NEED GOOD SALES REPS THAT’LL WORK
HARD TO REPLACE SALES REPS THAT WOULDN’T!”

A part of this healthy, nutritious breakfast

Neo-Colonialist Hegemonism - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Neo-Colonialist Hegemonism

Some call it somethingphobic and bellicose
Crude masculinist supremacy (by far)
Insensitive, sexist, and just plain gross –
But it’s righteously vegan – my weekly cigar!

The Enlightenment: a Dim and Dripping Corridor - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Enlightenment

A dimly-lit and dripping corridor
Echoing with the screams of broken souls
As they are liberated for a new age
The executioner adjusts his hood,
Wipes his hands free of blood and fragments of bone,
And checks his incoming text-messages.

THE WAR PRAYER, Mark Twain (1905)

The War Prayer

by Mark Twain

It was a time of great and exalting excitement. The country was up in arms, the war was on, in every breast burned the holy fire of patriotism; the drums were beating, the bands playing, the toy pistols popping, the bunched firecrackers hissing and spluttering; on every hand and far down the receding and fading spread of roofs and balconies a fluttering wilderness of flags flashed in the sun; daily the young volunteers marched down the wide avenue gay and fine in their new uniforms, the proud fathers and mothers and sisters and sweethearts cheering them with voices choked with happy emotion as they swung by; nightly the packed mass meetings listened, panting, to patriot oratory with stirred the deepest deeps of their hearts, and which they interrupted at briefest intervals with cyclones of applause, the tears running down their cheeks the while; in the churches the pastors preached devotion to flag and country, and invoked the God of Battles beseeching His aid in our good cause in outpourings of fervid eloquence which moved every listener.

It was indeed a glad and gracious time, and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.

Sunday morning came — next day the battalions would leave for the front; the church was filled; the volunteers were there, their young faces alight with martial dreams — visions of the stern advance, the gathering momentum, the rushing charge, the flashing sabers, the flight of the foe, the tumult, the enveloping smoke, the fierce pursuit, the surrender!

Then home from the war, bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory! With the volunteers sat their dear ones, proud, happy, and envied by the neighbors and friends who had no sons and brothers to send forth to the field of honor, there to win for the flag, or, failing, die the noblest of noble deaths. The service proceeded; a war chapter from the Old Testament was read; the first prayer was said; it was followed by an organ burst that shook the building, and with one impulse the house rose, with glowing eyes and beating hearts, and poured out that tremendous invocation:

God the all-terrible! Thou who ordainest,
Thunder thy clarion and lightning thy sword!

Then came the “long” prayer. None could remember the like of it for passionate pleading and moving and beautiful language. The burden of its supplication was, that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory —

An aged stranger entered and moved with slow and noiseless step up the main aisle, his eyes fixed upon the minister, his long body clothed in a robe that reached to his feet, his head bare, his white hair descending in a frothy cataract to his shoulders, his seamy face unnaturally pale, pale even to ghastliness. With all eyes following him and wondering, he made his silent way; without pausing, he ascended to the preacher’s side and stood there waiting. With shut lids the preacher, unconscious of his presence, continued his moving prayer, and at last finished it with the words, uttered in fervent appeal, “Bless our arms, grant us the victory, O Lord and God, Father and Protector of our land and flag!”

The stranger touched his arm, motioned him to step aside — which the startled minister did — and took his place. During some moments he surveyed the spellbound audience with solemn eyes, in which burned an uncanny light; then in a deep voice he said:

“I come from the Throne — bearing a message from Almighty God!” The words smote the house with a shock; if the stranger perceived it he gave no attention. “He has heard the prayer of His servant your shepherd, and will grant it if such be your desire after I, His messenger, shall have explained to you its import — that is to say, its full import. For it is like unto many of the prayers of men, in that it asks for more than he who utters it is aware of — except he pause and think. “God’s servant and yours has prayed his prayer. Has he paused and taken thought? Is it one prayer? No, it is two — one uttered, and the other not. Both have reached the ear of Him who heareth all supplications, the spoken and the unspoken. Ponder this — keep it in mind. If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon your neighbor at the same time. If you pray for the blessing of rain on your crop which needs it, by that act you are possibly praying for a curse on some neighbor’s crop which may not need rain and can be injured by it.

“You have heard your servant’s prayer — the uttered part of it. I am commissioned by God to put into words the other part of it — that part which the pastor — and also you in your hearts — fervently prayed silently. And ignorantly and unthinkingly? God grant that it was so! You heard the words ‘Grant us the victory, O Lord our God!’ That is sufficient. The whole of the uttered prayer is compact into those pregnant words. Elaborations were not necessary. When you have prayed for victory you have prayed for many unmentioned results which follow victory — must follow it, cannot help but follow it. Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!

“Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it —

For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!

We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

(After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”

...

It was believed afterward that the man was a lunatic, because there was no sense in what he said.

A Small Man Orders His War - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Small Man Orders His War

Proud carrier fleets roam the murmuring world
As Hannibal’s elephants trod Italy –
Grey monsters in search of an enemy
Not yet declared, but with hubris unfurled

In decadence, ruled by smooth ganymedes,
Courtier-generals in their airy cars
Wage resumes’ high above their wars –
So strong in single-malt, so weak in deeds

In his softly-lit bunker the war-god smiles;
His bony hand upon a plastic screen
Commands strange engines, obscure and obscene,
To make a peace through smoking, ashy piles

But empires in the end must die, atone
Their sins, perhaps as trunkless legs of stone.


(Allusions to T. S. Eliot, the Punic Wars, and Shelley)

Poems and Haversacks - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Poems and Haversacks

A poem is a pilgrim’s haversack
All neatly, tightly packed for walkabout:
Toothbrush and rhymes rolled together betimes
Spare socks and meter tucked in with great care

And pocket knife and similes as if
Skivvies and metaphors were something else
Alliteration lined in lovingly
Syntax and shaving kit accessible

Because

When organized in compact unity
Poems and haversacks engage a life that’s free

In Darwin's Pawprints - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

In Darwin’s Pawprints

On reading a book review entitled “In Darwin’s Footprints”

The new and improved opposable thumb
Can handily (you will pardon the pun) grasp
A tool, a stick, a pen, a glass of rum
(But dareth not to clasp Cleopatra’s asp)

If we are descended from sophomores
Then why are there still sophomores in the wild
Or random selection from random spores
Mutating from flower to flower child

I don’t know

But it’s a useful thing, my dear old chum
This new and improved opposable thumb

The Playboy Club - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Playboy Club

The bunny boys are sad, decayed old swells
Now centerfolded in cemeteries and cells

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Time Travel

On a stack of giveaways, a paperback:
The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – The Mad Scientist Affair
Napoleon with each sable hair in place
And Ilya in his groovy turtleneck

Poised for action on a four-color cover
With clever gadgets against wicked T.H.R.U.S.H.
Spies, guns, jet planes, secret lairs, beautiful girls
Mr. Waverly, and “Open Channel D”

Solo and Kuryakin, so cool, yeah, man -
Teachers and parents – they just didn’t understand!

We Were Speaking of Trigger Warnings and Alarm Clocks - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

In Mixed Meter, A Meditation Upon Alarm Clocks

The healing sleep of which Macbeth spoke enviously…

SHATTERED!

The metal ****cans kicked across the room
A giant light fixture hurting my face
Because I thought a top rack a safer space
Large men yelling things my mother would not approve:

“REVEILLE! REVEILLE! REVEILLE!
RISE AND SHINE, AND GREET THE NEW DAY!
LET GO YER ****S AND GRAB YER SOCKS!
GET OFF YER LAZY ***ES YA SORRY SQUIRRELS!”

A hundred and sixty bare feet hit the deck
In perfect Navy unison at 03-my-God-is-this-real-00

And somehow, all these many years later
The soft ding-dong of a tiny MePhone
Sounds even worse

Does the Dawn Require a Trigger Warning? -poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Does the Dawn Require a Trigger Warning?

A sunrise has no trigger warning, no:
The dawn is not that misty night which was;
A sinister click, and the radio speaks
Tidings of discomfort and joylessness

     Someone must be made to suffer for this1

There is no trigger warning from the clock
Announcing brutally the need to rise
As from the dead, and dress for this day’s work
Which lacks all hope of glamour and success

     Someone must be made to suffer for this

Life is not fitted with warnings, and so
One’s discomfort is the fault of others

     Someone must be made to suffer for this


1“Someone must be made to suffer for this” is a mimeme from Frederick William Rolfe’s Hadrian VII.

Accounted Beautiful - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Accounted Beautiful

“…things long by catholic consent accounted beautiful”

-Quiller-Couch

An act forbidden now, we go to weep
On Skyros at the grave of that rare youth
Where buried with him are the unities
Of all: the good, the beautiful, the true

For men have flung away their thoughts, their songs
Their verse, their noble instruments of work
And scream abuse at all those forms of art
With which their sires hymned chaos into peace

A cause forbidden now, we work to keep
For all: the good, the beautiful, and the true

On the Nature of Work - column

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

On the Nature of Work

“What should they find incredible, since they no longer believed in a rational universe?”

-C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

In Mr. Johnson’s 6th grade science class we kidlets learned that work is defined as the transfer of energy from one object to another. For many of Mr. J’s students work was further defined by their parents as farming. Still, I’m not sure how many joules are required for a small boy to urge balky jersey cows x 24 from the woods to the dairy barn at five in the morning with the sleet rattling. The small boy, now all grown up, knows only that he is thankful daily that he will never, ever have to do that again.

In a movie set in Nazi-occupied Poland, a number of folks gather discreetly to view a play, which is forbidden. While waiting, a man asks the woman next to him what her occupation is. She mentions that she was studying law before the war, and asks the man his job. “I break rocks,” he replies proudly.

The scene is a bit contrived, but is meant to demonstrate the Christian concept that all honest work is noble. This is why attorneys and quarrymen belong to the same country clubs. Still, the concept of the dignity of good and useful labor obtains.

Last week a young American woman’s dissatisfaction with her useless work appears to have motivated her to violence, resulting in the wounding of others and her own death.

Her work was neither in law, milking cows, or quarrying rock, but in taking pictures of herself for a scheme on the InterGossip.

This, in contemporary slang, is A Thing.

A man take pictures of his dachshunds or his children or himself doing awkward things and posts them to YouTube on the InterGossip. If enough people – really, really, really bored people with no purpose or direction in life – are determined by a corporate matrix (that sounds like something from cheesy outer-space films from the 1950s) to watch certain moving pictures, advertisers are matched with the little films and the poster receives a small stipend for every contact, or “hit.”

Apparently a favored few make a living by humiliating their dachshunds, their children, and themselves for the amusement of the unfocused.

This is said to be work, but it produces no food, no music, no fencing, no housing, or anything else of utility or joy.

This poor woman took humiliating pictures of herself glaring at the camera, dancing awkwardly, and giving opinions. She received money for doing so.

She felt she wasn’t being paid enough money for her specialness, although she had enough disposable income to buy herself a pistol and then drive to YouTube headquarters to shoot people she had never met.

The unhappy woman promoted herself as an “athlete, artist, comedian, poet, model, actor, singer, director, producer” (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/youtube-shooter-nasim-aghdam-left-behind-twisted-online-trail-article-1.3914285) as well as a vegan bodybuilder and an animal rights activist. Human rights, nahhhhhh.

Apparently she felt that real work – milking cows, breaking rocks, practicing law – was beneath the dignity of an artist, and was so obsessed with making and watching images of herself on a little plastic screen that in the end she ceased to exist at all.

Poor, sad woman – if only she had herded a few cows or worked the counter at the fast-foodery or volunteered at the local charity re-sale shop she might have realized through her aching feet and tired muscles that she was a child of God who was both useful and needed.

-30-

Breakfast with Old Man Briggs - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Breakfast with Old Man Briggs

“Why, then, God’s soldier be he.”

-Shakespeare

“I’m Old Man Briggs,” he laughed, shaking my hand
That famous merry twinkle in his eye;
He made the table at the Cracker Barrel
A festival of right good fellowship

But even as the plates were passed around
And with them too the happy banter of men
He sometimes seemed to drift away in thought
Into the past, into the mists, into -

His boyhood bayous, and the fields of youth
The desperation of Depression years
And still a boy, on the shingle at Normandy
Fighting across the smoky fields of France

Then home again to build the peace for us
With muscle and sweat, and with love and thought
Citizen-soldier, happy raconteur -
“I’m Old Man Briggs,” he laughed, shaking our hands

His place is empty now, just a little while
For we will see him again, at Supper

A Busy Beekeeper and His Beautiful Buzzing Bees - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Busy Beekeeper and his Beautiful Buzzing Bees

For Terry McFall, a Man of Bees and a Bees-y Man!

A beekeeper knows
That beauty is in the eye
of the bee-holder

As the Sun Rises over Big Linda's Get 'N' Go the Local Wal-Mart Day Shift Plots Revolution - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

As the Sun Rises over Big Linda’s Grab ‘N’ Go

the Local Wal-Mart Day Shift Plots Revolution

Against the patriarchal construct they
Rally in a corner booth at Big Linda’s
MePhones, sody-dranks, a full-up ash tray
Tabled as if these were the agendas

And uniformed in uniforms they sit
In conclave all unanimous to judge
Their boss to be: a sorry piece of (stuff)
A drab, a dork, a doof, a dolt, a drudge

A slime, a slob, a slug, a slag, a schlo -
Oh, wait! We’re late! The time! We’d better go!

Withdrawn by Instructor - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Withdrawn by Instructor

He wore a baseball cap, and tried to hide
Beneath its bill, hide from whatever was
Eating away his thirty-something soul
Adrift among the stagnant slush of life

He never bought the book, he never much
Looked up from the class notes he never took
His ballpoint pen asleep in an idle fist
No drafts, no drawings, no songs, no verse, no worse

Someone lied to him about following his dreams –
His dreams between theses and themes, it seems

Christos Voskrese! - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Christos Voskrese!

For William Tod Mixson

The world is unusually quiet this dawn
With fading stars withdrawing in good grace
And drowsy, dreaming sunflowers, dewy-drooped,
Their golden crowns all motionless and still,
Stand patiently in their ordered garden rows,
Almost as if they wait for lazy bees
To wake and work, and so begin the day.
A solitary swallow sweeps the sky;
An early finch proclaims his leafy seat
While Old Kashtanka limps around the yard
Snuffling the boundaries on her morning patrol.

Then wide-yawning Mikhail, happily barefoot,
A lump of bread for nibbling in one hand,
A birch switch swishing menace in the other
Appears, and whistles up his father’s cows:
“Hey! Alina, and Antonina! Up!
Up, up, Diana and Dominika!
You, too, Varvara and Valentina!
Pashka is here, and dawn, and spring, and life!”
And they are not reluctant then to rise
From sweet and grassy beds, with udders full,
Cow-gossip-lowing to the dairy barn.

Anastasia lights the ikon lamp
And crosses herself as her mother taught.
She’ll brew the tea, the strong black wake-up tea,
And think about that naughty, handsome Yuri
Who winked at her during the Liturgy
On the holiest midnight of the year.
O pray that watchful Father did not see!
Breakfast will be merry, an echo-feast
Of last night’s eggs, pysanky, sausage, kulich.
And Mother will pack Babushka’s basket,
Because only a mother can do that right

When Father Vasily arrived last night
In a limping Lada haloed in smoke,
The men put out their cigarettes and helped
With every precious vestment, cope, and chain,
For old Saint Basil’s has not its own priest,
Not since the Czar, and Seraphim-Diveyevo
From time to time, for weddings, holy days,
Funerals, supplies the needs of the parish,
Often with Father Vasily (whose mother
Begins most conversations with “My son,
The priest.…”, much to the amusement of all).

Voices fell, temperatures fell, darkness fell
And stars hovered low over the silent fields,
Dark larches, parking lots, and tractor sheds.
Inside the lightless church the priest began
The ancient prayers of desolate emptiness
To which the faithful whispered in reply,
Unworthy mourners at the Garden tomb,
Spiraling deeper and deeper in grief
Until that Word, by Saint Mary Magdalene
Revealed, with candles, hymns, and midnight bells
Spoke light and life to poor but hopeful souls.

The world is unusually quiet this dawn;
The sun is new-lamb warm upon creation,
For Pascha gently rests upon the earth,
This holy Russia, whose martyrs and saints
Enlighten the nations through their witness of faith,
Mercy, blessings, penance, and prayer eternal
Now rising with a resurrection hymn,
And even needful chores are liturgies:
“Christos Voskrese – Christ is risen indeed!”
And Old Kashtanka limps around the yard
Snuffling the boundaries on her morning patrol

Easter Vigil, Sort Of - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Easter Vigil, Sort Of

A vigil, no, simply quiet reflection
Minutes before midnight, with all asleep
Little Liesl-Dog perhaps dreams of squirrels,
For she has chased and barked them all the day;
The kittens are disposed with their mother
After an hour of kitty-baby-talk,
Adored by all, except by Calvin-Cat,
That venerable, cranky old orange hair-ball,
Who resents youthful intrusion upon
His proper role as object of worship.

The household settles in for the spring night,
Anticipating Easter, early Mass,
And then the appropriately pagan
Merriments of chocolates and colored eggs
And children with baskets squealing for more
As children should, in the springtime of life.

A Night of Fallen Nothingness - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Night of Fallen Nothingness

The Altar stripped, the candles dark, the Cross
Concealed behind a purple shroud, the sun
Mere slantings through an afternoon of grief
While all the world is emptied of all hope.
The dead remain, the failing light withdraws
As do the broken faithful, silently,
Into a night of fallen nothingness.

The Life and Times of Pontius Pilate, the Law West of the Jordan - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Life and Times of Pontius Pilate, the Law West of the Jordan

History, other than those weird little Jack Chick booklets and stuff about The Lizard People on the GossipNet, says little of Pontius Pilate. Apparently his career in the Roman diplomatic was fairly short before he was retired by suicide.

A life of loyal public service under the emperors was often rewarded with death, which was probably better than a farewell kiss from the president.

As a colonial governor Pilate would have been expected to keep the peace among all sorts of peoples, not because of the benevolence of Tiberius but because tax-tax is always better than war-war (as Churchill did not say).

One wonders if in his corner office Pilate displayed pictures of himself shaking hands with famous people, or maybe ordering their executions, and plaques from the Little Gladiator teams he sponsored. Did he give speeches at local business dinners? “I am Praefectvs Pontivs Pilatvs, but you may call me Poncho. I’m from Rome, and I’m here to help you grow your businesses.”

No doubt the after-dinner speech included a few wheezes: “Say, boys, you’ll like this one. A Greek, a Roman, and a Jew walk into a bar owned by an Egyptian…”

Pontius Pilate probably gave motivational speeches (which in itself should be a death penalty offense) and talked about thinking outside the box outside of which he never thought himself, and kept his resume updated in hopes of a better gig in a happier colony, maybe Crete or Cyprus or Hispania.

He would have been subjected to scrutiny by spies and investigations by special prosecutors, and in turn would have sent around the highways and byways of the Empire his own spies and, when he felt he had the power and the connections to get rid of some old pal he didn’t now like, special prosecutors under his authority.

His staff would have kept his files cross-indexed and neat, and at midday he probably joined the boys for a two-falernian lunch, properly submitted under his expense account.

Pilate named roads and bridges and theatres for his Emperor, had the usual suspects executed for the entertainment of The People, bless them, and probably told anti-Semitic jokes. He was so dull, safe, successful, and predictable that he was governor for some ten years before being recalled to Rome.

Nothing reliable is known of his end. Pilate is said to have been required to commit suicide instead of being given a cheap Seiko sun-dial as a memento, but perhaps he did indeed retire to his vineyards in central Italy, and took leisurely afternoons to write his memoirs, in which few were interested and which eventually were used by Germanic invaders to start a fire, and so lost to history.

Whether he remembered one Jesus of Nazareth is unknown.

-30-

Russians Under Our Beds (a Russia Series, 66) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Russians Under Our Beds

For Our Special Prosecutors,

Who Guard and Guide Us

Oh, borscht! Those pesky Russkies under my bed
Were marching around all night, changing my votes
Beaming mysterious rays through my sleepy head
And snooping through my lesson plans and notes

They programmed my radio with Marx and Lenin
Plastered a poster of Putin to my wall
Sailed Admiral Kuznetzov across my linen
Layered a Petrograd accent over my Texas drawl

The special prosecutor says no further discussions –
Everything’s the fault of those perfidious Russians!

Maundy Thursday - Mass of the Last Supper (poem)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Maundy Thursday – Mass of the Last Supper

“Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”

-Shakespeare

The air is thurified – the incense given
Our Lord upon His birth is fumed at last;
The censer’s chains, clanking like manacles
Offend against the silence at the end of Mass

Supper is concluded; the servants strip
The Table bare of all the Seder service:
Cups, linens, and dishes, leaving in the dark
An Altar bare, prepared for sacrifice

In Gethsemane the flowered air is sweet
But iron-heeled caligae offend the night

Prince Myshkin's Vigil (a Russia series, 65) - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Prince Myshkin’s Vigil

Pale Prince Myshkin keeps vigil in a room
In which two aspects of civilization repose:
That which is dying, and that which is dead
That which is cold, and that which is very cold

The wounded healer waits, because he was asked
And harrows there the darkness with his light
He waits with the dead in a rented room
And on a hill, beside a waterfall

A keeper of souls for an appointed time
And his own is kept by Somebody Else



cf, Dostoyevsky's The Idiot

The First Hummingbird of Spring - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The First Hummingbird of Spring

O wing’ed messenger of happiness,
Aloft among the pollinating flowers,
At last you have returned from Mexico
And warm months there among soft latitudes
Where little birds can make a holiday
Far, far away from withering Arctic winds.

O tiny traveler, what souvenirs
Did you declare to customs at the Rio Grande?
South winds to tell the flowers to wake up
And Rosaries of morning fogs to bless
The yawning grasses with a morning drink,
And fresh new sunlight for the industrious bees.

O buzzing and impatient little friend!
Just wait a minute, your breakfast is coming -
The old glass feeder washed and packed away
In harvest-rich October’s golden light
Must be recovered and refreshed for you,

And

How good it is to have you home again.