New York Invaded by Communist Spy Alligator - weekly column 2.19.2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

New York Invaded by Communist Spy Alligator

 

On Sunday morning a four-foot alligator was found swimming in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park Lake.

 

Reptiles of a sort are not uncommon in New York, but not alligators.  The question being asked all over America this week is if this was a Communist Chinese spy alligator checking out the nuclear capability of the paddle boats.

 

President Xi has neither confirmed nor denied that this was in fact a Communist Chinese weather alligator.

 

Park workers pulled the creature out of the water for something less than $450,000 each and took it to an animal care center for evaluation: “Well, yeah, that’s an alligator.  A cold alligator.”

 

Greta Thunberg will burn tons of fuel to fly to New York in a luxury jet, assemble the park staff, and Miz Grundy at them, “How dare you! How DARE you!” The park staff will obediently applaud her.

 

Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau will state that he gave the order for New York park workers to seize the alligator as part of our NORAD agreement.

 

Al Gore will blame global warming.

 

Meaghan and Harry will blame Queen Camilla.

 

Congressman George Santos will claim that with one hand tied behind his back he wrestled that twelve-foot, 1,200-pound alligator into submission and thus saved New York from Godzilla.

 

We don’t know what the Vice President said; no one does.

 

President Biden is expected to address the nation this evening and stand tall for America against any waterborne incursions by unidentified reptiles.

 

Fox News may or may not claim that New York was not invaded by illegal alligators during the Trump presidency.

 

Somewhere a kindergarten class will be directed to sponsor a naming contest for the poor little misunderstood alligator. AlligatoryMcAlligatorFace will win. Bet on it.

 

North Korea will launch a nuclear-capable alligator toward Japan.

 

Since Sunday there have been reported alligator sightings in Stoner, British Columbia, along the coast of Nunavut, and at a Tim Horton’s at Niagara Falls. It’s a plot. They’re coming. Watch the skies! Watch the rivers! Watch the bathroom drains! Watch the Air Force generals give each other more medals!

 

-30-

 

The Saturday Morning Tee-Ball Hero - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

The Saturday Morning Tee-Ball Hero

 

This one’s for you, tee-ball dads!

 

A little moppet scampers around the tee

Waving her plastic bat as a warrior’s sword

Or as a fairy-wand to magic the day

Her first-ever tee-ball lesson with Dad

 

He places the ball upon the tee; she swings –

“Now wait until Daddy takes his hand away…”

WHACK!

He didn’t know the bat was all that hard!

 

He rubs his hand and adjusts his cap; she laughs –

At her daddy the Saturday tee-ball hero

On the Consumption of Art - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

On the Consumption of Art

 

An artist writes about the consumption of art

As if a painting, a poem, a video

A statue in the lobby of the medical center

Were a tin of meatballs and spaghetti

 

But we do not consume a work of art

Sometimes we almost seem to marry it

Joining art in a sacrament of love

Beyond the velvet ropes of ownership

 

That which can be possessed can be consumed

But neither art nor love is a commodity

Not Exactly Saint Mark - short poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Not Exactly Saint Mark

 

“Who do you say that I am?”

 

‘“Whom,’” replied the local schoolmaster.

Attitude Check - short poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Attitude Check

 

Climb down off your white horse

And sit in the shade of the trees

To drink from your canteen

A taste of humility

The 'Way-Cool Coffee Shop - poem

 Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

The ‘Way-Cool Coffee Shop

 

Down in the street little eddies of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything…

 

-George Orwell, 1984

 

Dirty windows glare out onto the parking lot

Where debris is blown by the sour winter wind

While worn-out Mardi Gras decorations

Slap against old awnings and creaking poles

 

The get-it-yourself coffee is cold

Every pump: the purported French Roast

Vienna Nights, Istanbul Breakfast Blend

Jamaican Mountain Select, American Road

 

They go well with the rubbery croissant

And its greasy smear of farm-fresh spread

The Great Canadian-American Balloon Shoot - weekly column 12 February 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Great Canadian-American Balloon Shoot

 

Last week Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau stated that he had ordered an American fighter aircraft to shoot down an unidentified flying object over northern Canada.

 

The Canadian prime minister can give orders to the American military?

 

One’s initial response might be to quote a character in John Wayne’s flawed but visually interesting film The Alamo who asks the rhetorical question, “Who do he think he am? Andy by-God Jackson?”

 

But in fact, yes, under NORAD agreements and duties shared by The Dominion of Canada and the United States of America there are occasions when Canada has strictly delineated and limited authority over U.S. military forces just as there are occasions when the U.S. has strictly delineated and limited authority over Canadian military forces.

 

Tilting the point-of-view of a globe (a flat map won’t do) from the north shows that the quickest routes for hostile attacks on Canada or the U.S.A. from some nations is over the polar ice. NORAD is a sine qua non for North America’s safety.

 

It's just that one does not imagine Mr. Trudeau ordering anything more militant than a vegan takeout.

 

But then, much the same obtains for our national leadership, which seems to have taken its methods of debate not from Major Roberts but from Cruella deVille.

 

As of this writing, the United States has shot down (maybe) off the coast of South Carolina a balloon following its leisurely tour of North America, a “cylindrical object” (maybe) over Deadhorse, Alaska (which may explain why the poor horse is dead), and, per the orders of Prime Minister Trudeau, another cylindrical object (maybe) over the Yukon. Sergeant Preston has not yet found the downed object.

 

On Sunday afternoon Mr. Trudeau said that Canada will recover the object. Canada. Leave Canada’s stuff alone [Justin Trudeau (@JustinTrudeau) / Twitter]. Mr. Trudeau ordered the United States to shoot down the UFO (that may or may not exist) and then Mr. Trudeau ordered the United States not to recover it. Yes, sir, Mr. Trudeau, sir.

The United States claims to have found parts of the balloon, but the cylindrical objects, like North Vietnamese patrol boats in the Gulf of Tonkin long ago, seem to be unsolved mysteries.

 

A fourth “radar anomaly” was seen or not seen over Montana on Saturday night [Montana congressman says mystery object detected above Havre remains above US | Daily Mail Online]. Mr. Trudeau has not ordered the United States either to shoot it or to stay away from it.

 

And, as your ‘umble scrivener ends this on Sunday evening, the news reports another mysterious something shot down over Lake Huron. Maybe.

 

We should all ask Representative George Santos of the 3^rd Congressional District of New York for the truth of the matter.

 

-30-

Super-Servile Sunday - a rebuke of Superbowl-ness

Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall46184@qol.com

                                                              Super-Servile Sunday

 

O sink not down to that corrosive couch,

Docile before the Orwellian screen
That regulates the lives of the servile,
Dictating dress and drink, demeanor, dreams;
Declare your independence from the sludge
Of vague obedientiaries who drowse
Away their empty lives in submission
To harsh, diagonal inches of rule,
Poor weaklings chanting tainted tribal songs
In chorus hamsterable, huddled, heaped,
While costumed in their masters’ liveries,
And feeling little while thinking even less,
The very model of the State’s non-men,
Predictable and dull, submissive ghosts
Crowded, herded in cosmic cattle chutes,
Reflected in dim, noisy nothingness.

But you, O you, be not of them, but be

A wanderer in the moonlight, one known
To God, there in His holy solitude.

from Paleo-Hippies at Work and Play, 2014, available on amazon.com

The Pastor Who Pinched my Walkman - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

The Pastor Who Pinched my Walkman

 

He was on television receiving an award

Community service to marginalized youth

And chairman of a committee of community pastors

For the promotion of community somethings

 

I remembered him from the fifth period

He was a funny kid when term began

By May his eyes had narrowed and his smile was gone

So was my Walkman, but I wished him well

 

When after a few more years he was sentenced to prison

It wasn’t for pinching somebody’s Walkman

Dreams Blown Apart at 60,000 Feet - Poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Dreams Blown Apart at 60,000 Feet

 

Spiraling down from the empyrean blue

Like a gutter-flung cigarette stub

Or a vapor trail over winter fields

Dreams blown apart at 60,000 feet

 

A spy balloon cannot compete with love

In its ascent to impossible heights

An unexpected launch

                                                 a sudden death

A fallen mystery lost among the ice

 

That brief encounter in the turn of a dance

Shot down with only her disapproving glance

Does the Moon Write Back? - very short poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Does the Moon Write Back?

 

Sometimes I wonder: does the moon ever write

A poem about me or you?

Everybody Writes a Poem About the Moon - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Everybody Writes a Poem About the Moon

 

Everybody writes about the moon

Often trying to force a balky rhyme

Along the continuum of spoon and croon

Which just won’t fill the bill, the quill, or the time

 

But the moon is there, whether we write or not

Silver and cool, beyond our scribbled praise

In contrast to the sun, golden and hot

Promoting himself through all of summer’s days

 

Everybody writes about the moon

Who in her being is all the rhyme we need

What Communists Learned from History - weekly column, 5 February 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

What Communists Learned from History

 

Maxwell Smart and The Chief conferring under The Cone of Silence might have come up with a more effective method of downing the Chinese spy balloon than our Space Command or whatever it is we’ve got defending us from The Helium Peril.

 

Yes, we do have a Space Command [Home (spacecom.mil)] complete with all sorts of costumes, a theme song entitled “The Space Force March,” and seven “warfighting units” – yes, that’s what they’re called, “warfighting units” - with cool shoulder patches.

 

Photographs show that the Space Command features at least six different kinds of attractive uniforms, so if this nation cannot control its own skies it can at least control fashion shows.

 

One of the uniforms is of a forest leaf pattern, which is curious given that spacecraft and space itself are devoid of forests. 

 

According to its own site the Space Command is responsible for defending us against threats (maybe Klingons?) more than 100 kilometres above the surface of the earth, so technically a Chinese balloon is not in their remit. Still, it could have been a chance for the Space Command to set phasers on stun and show the guys from Peking just who’s boss of American skies.

 

As for the purported civilian weather balloon, nah; no one believes that form of camouflage. Lots of nations spy on each other with balloons, airplanes, fishing boats, and other vessels and devices, all of them said to be civilian craft for the purpose of plausible deniability. Spies lie; it’s what they do.

 

An Air Force fighter shot down the spy balloon and its gadgetry with a missile said to cost over $400,000.  The merry lads in Peking claim to be outraged about the shootdown but probably they are merely amused. A balloon is low-tech and probably costs less than a missile, and this one was allowed to float over North America for days while gathering information. Whether or not it was effective it was inexpensive, and Uncle Xi enjoyed pulling Uncle Sam’s whiskers.

 

The irony is that we all read, heard, and saw the story on electronic devices made in Shanghai. If the Communists want to know what we’re talking about they could probably tap a few keys and have the computerized thermostats in our refrigerators listen in.

 

And, say, don’t you think the coffee machine has been acting a little suspiciously lately?

 

This nation has been attacked, not simply watched, through the military use of balloons. In 1944-1945 the Japanese launched against North America thousands of balloons armed with explosives and incendiaries [New Documentary Delves into the Japanese WWII Terror Weapon: The Fu-Go Balloon Bomb (historynet.com)].  Several thousand of these made landfall and killed six people and caused some damage. Some of these devices might have failed and if so a few unexploded bombs remain lost in the woods and mountains of the American West.

 

Modern Communists learned history well from the imperial Japanese of eighty years ago – cobble together a few rudimentary barometric mechanisms for controlling height through the measured disposal of gasses and ballast and know the seasonal air currents on the same academic level as a seventh-grader. Launch. Wait. See.

 

Now, then, what clever boy or girl in some hostile nation is up to some unexpected mischief based on lessons learned from the German Enigma or the British Turing-Welchman Bombe?

 

-30-

Assisted Living -poem

 

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

“Remarkably Like Any Other Place”

 

For Tod

 

Who is in assisted living

Assisting others in living

 

Rich: This is an awful place.

 

More: Except it’s keeping me from you, my dears, it’s not so bad. Remarkably like any other place.

 

Alice: It drips!

 

More: Yes. Too near the river.

 

-Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

 

Life is a pilgrimage from cell to cell:

The bedroom of one’s childhood, the college dorm

The noisy barracks, merry in spite of all

Eighty conscript soldiers bunked out in rows

 

The marriage home set forth among trees and grass

A comfortable chair with a lamp and books

The office with its official desks and files

And Sunday liturgies in an accustomed pew

 

All these are now condensed into a cell

Where God has chosen to live and wait with you

(I suppose I'd better clarify that my friend Tod sees his room as a monastic cell, not a prison cell!)

That Chinese Spy Balloon - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

That Chinese Spy Balloon

 

“Number Six is dead. Rover got him.”

 

-Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner

 

A spy balloon lurks over Montana

And nobody seems to know what to do

Against the intruder Top Guns launch themselves

But only circle around it piteously

 

They slink away, intimidated by a balloon

That takes its pictures and samples with insolence

Unmenaced by our Merovingian regime

Generals bemedaled like Russian doormen

 

Our leaders stumble over each other’s gaffes

While in Shanghai the Politburo laughs

MUSICAL TABLES, Billy Collins - a brief review

 Lawrence Hall

mhall46184@aol.com

Musical Tables, Billy Collins: A White-Space Ripoff

If you purchase this volume as a notebook with a few piquant aphorisms already scribbled here and there on its pages you will have some value for your $26 (now under $20 via Amazon).  If you buy it as a volume of poetry you will delight in many of those brief witticisms but as a whole might be disappointed that Mr. Collins and Random House have your money and you have lots of wasted wood pulp.

El Camino Real de los Tejas - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

El Camino Real de los Tejas

 

A WPA highway crumbling in the sun

Oriented west where dreams disappear

Among the beer cans and the cinder blocks:

El Camino Real de los Tejas

 

Sharing a joint, throwing rocks at snakes

Where the Santa Fe tracks used to run

Now there’s not even a bus out of town:

El Camino Real de los Tejas

 

They don’t even know that they’re the sons of kings:

In exile along El Camino Real

Appropriating Babushkas from the Orthodox - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Appropriating Babushkas from the Orthodox

 

(upon the first Sunday home from the hospital)

 

A babushka badly in need of a hearing aid

Asked me if I would sub for the missing lector

I apologetically said I really didn’t feel up to it

And would she please ask somebody else.

 

I tracked her progress back to the narthex by sound:

 

“HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!”  “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!”  “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!”

 

But it’s all good; God gives us babushkas

To show us that the Faith, like the babushkas

 

Will never go away

The Senate Protects Us from Evil - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

The Senate Protects Us from Evil

 

Russian ships creep up upon our coasts

Armed with tsircon missiles to make us ghosts

 

Police gangs “serve and protect” with beatings and scars

Anonymous in hoodies and unmarked cars

 

Each self-appointed Grand Inquisitor looks

Through school and public libraries for dirty books

 

The poor can’t afford to buy meat, bread, and eggs

And so

Congress investigates Taylor Swift’s…tickets

The Road Not Taken (Or Was It?) - weekly column 1.29.2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Road Not Taken – Or Was It?

 

 

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

 

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

 

-Edward Thomas

 

Those of us of a certain age (cough) remember the dim, blue-ish television images of Robert Frost reciting from memory his short poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President Kennedy. Because of the wind and the glaring winter sunlight Frost could not read the poem he had written for the occasion and so made a quick save with an older one he knew by heart.

 

“The Gift Outright” would now be condemned as imperialist, colonialist, and all the other usual “ist” suspects if anyone read poetry at all, so it’s safe enough. Indeed, in an arc from Mexico City to Ottawa via Washington the idea of any North American carrying a book is now as unthinkable as Odysseus carrying the Winnowing Oar as directed by Tiresius.

 

But it was not always so. For most of history literature was poetry; prose was for recording facts and shopping lists. When you read through what is dismissed as Victorian parlour poetry you can see that although the sentiments are often mawkish the technical skills of ordinary people in their letters and notebooks are also very highly developed.

 

The First World War created such a crisis of culture and a failure of hope that although well-written work continued for a generation as a sort of existential  brenschluss, poetry after Frost is often little more than self-pitying, self-referential free verse that connects only with whether or not the writer’s feelings have been hurt today or if he (the pronoun is gender-neutral) has had a satisfactory bowel movement lately.

 

In 1912-1915 Robert Frost’s metaphorical road took him to England where he hoped to develop a career as a poet. He became great friends with the successful travel writer, Edward Thomas, who encouraged him and made some useful introductions that indeed began making Frost famous.

 

Frost admired Thomas’ descriptive travel essays and encouraged him to render some of his work as verse.

 

In 1915 Frost returned to America and Thomas remained in England undecided as to whether to follow Frost and continue his career in the U.S.A. or, at 36, to join the British Army.  When Frost published “The Road Not Taken,” Thomas, thinking the poem a criticism of his well-known indecision in most matters, enlisted, and was killed in action in 1917.

 

Indeed, the poem may have been nothing more than a little joke based on the fact that Frost and Thomas, who loved hiking, often really did argue about what trail or road they should take.

 

As for “The Road Not Taken,” it is very much alive and the subject of badly-written undergraduate essays beginning with the ever-useless, “In my opinion…”

 

An acquaintance reminds me that even a very young reader understands “The Road Not Taken” on levels, but that an older reader, looking back upon the decisions he has made in life, truly feels it.

 

Most of the poems of Frost are as fresh and relevant now as they were in the last century, and worth a re-read without the unholy inquisition of some tiresome English teacher asking you what a line means when it’s darned obvious what the line means.

 

Just don’t read in public; people will stare at you.

 

-30-

 

Corporal Karamazov Flies Home from the War - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Corporal Karamazov Flies Home from the War

 

“Which war?”

 

“Your war – there’s always a war.”

 

Every young reader sees Alyosha in himself

A sensitive mystic, misunderstood by most

Questing for an answer to a question unasked

Politely shown the door by Father Zosima

 

As Old Karamazov? Impossible

53 is an age of antiquity

As Dimitri, Ivan, and Smerdyakov?

They are unable to sort out themselves

 

Lost in thought in a contract airline seat:

 

A 22-year-old just two days off the line

A patriarchal colonialist ideologue

Memphian Lamentation

 Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Memphian Lamentation

 

Let us not point to the blood in the street

As if the murder were somebody else’s fault

As if the narrative belonged on a screen

As if we can be healed with a channel change

 

Let us instead look within our fatal selves

With every resentment validating the Fall of Man

With every snub murdering Abel again

With every lie sentencing Christ to death

 

Let us not point to the blood in the street:

We are all Pontius Pilate, washing our hands

A Student Does Not Repose in a Passive State of Being - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

A Student Does Not Repose in a Passive State of Being

 

A student is not in a passive state of being

But is rather a soul-probing projectile

Penetrating the wisdom of centuries

And coming out on the other side

 

Still curious, but a meteor now

Time is a Falling Leaf (Battery not Included) - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Time is a Falling Leaf (Battery not Included)

 

A child and a puppy playing on the lawn

Tumbling through soft grass in the bliss of June

We joy in their celebration of life

Everything is new

                                      Except that it isn’t

 

An old man and a dog dozing in a chair

Dreaming of their youth in the bliss of June

We joy in their celebration of life

Everything is old

                                      Except that it isn’t

 

Time is a falling leaf

                                      Except that it isn’t

Waiting in a Medical Office Parking Lot on a Stormy Day - short poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Waiting in a Medical Office Parking Lot on a Stormy Day

 

Green street signs vibrate in the shifting winds

Oh, gosh, lady, hang on to that little child!

“If this van is rockin’ don’t come a-knockin’”

Okay, but a shiny new Subaru?

Happy Nonsense Rhymes for V.B.

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Happy Nonsense Rhymes for V.B.

 

From an exchange of rhymes on Hellopoetry.com

 

A tuppence for your hopes and dreams

A florin for flowers for your hair

A sixpence for some seven sunbeams

A half-crown for a comfy fireside chair

Irresponsible Men with Firearms - weekly column 1.22.2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

And for What?

 

In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he [Satan] could find nothing more interesting to think of than his own prestige.

 

-C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 96

 

Many cultures follow the lunar calendar rather than the solar, which is interesting and enlightening. In Viet-Nam the lunar new year is called Tet Nguyen Dan, which means the first day of the new year. Tet is not only the new lunar year for Vietnamese, it is also the first day of spring and everyone’s birthday (Tet Holiday: The Age-Old Tradition Explained | Vietcetera). Good fun for everyone as another strengthening strand in our national tapestry.

 

Not all who observe the lunar year do so in exactly the same way, but it is always an occasion for merriment and gratitude.

 

Unfortunately, there are those who resent parties and feasts and dances and cookouts and families and friends simply sitting outside on a summer night talking or playing dominos while the rug-rats chase lightnin’ bugs across the lawn. Each happy custom or tradition, a “ceremony of innocence,” as Yeats would say, arouses in some unhappy souls resentment instead of joy.

 

Last weekend a man unhappy with his life chose to take a pistol and destroy the lives and hopes of innocent people who were dancing the old year out and the new year in. To paraphrase Lewis, on an evening of light, love, song, feast, and dance which he could have joined this man focused only on his own self-pity.

 

We can’t really know what was in his mind, but we know the man got angry – okay, let’s make that down-home plain – a man got mad. He left home with a gun to take his mad out on people. We need to learn the lesson - that can never end well for anyone. He killed and hurt innocent folks just because he was mad at…  Mad at what? And then he ended his own life slumped over the steering wheel of a van in a parking lot.

 

That’s no way to live.

 

That’s no way to die.

 

-30-

A Field Guide to Fields - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

A Field Guide to Fields

 

Watermelons, sunflowers, field corn, sweet corn

Sweet potatoes, green peas, butterbeans, squash

Cabbages, purplehulls, lettuces in rows

And across the fence, red clover in glorious clouds

 

But the most glorious field is in midsummer hay

Green-dancing beneath the benevolent sun

Crosstracked by beagles, terrapins, foxes, and rabbits

And little boys off to the fishing hole

 

Those little paths across farm fields, you know

Lead to happy memories of the long-ago

An Amazon Driver with Skull Earrings - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

An Amazon Driver with Skull Earrings

 

No, of course he’s not an Amazon; he’s a man

Navigating a big ol’ delivery truck through life

Ferrying to addresses this side of the Styx

Brown pasteboard boxes and white plastic envelopes

 

I wanted to ask him about his goal in life

But he was in a hurry to turn around

And continue his rowing, so I thanked him

And he thanked me, and I don’t know his dream

 

A man with skull earrings and muscled arms -

I hope he’s steering toward a happier shore

When the Farmer's Daughter was Late for School - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

When the Farmer’s Daughter was Late for School

 

She was a petite and delicate child

And studious, her work among the best

Beloved of her classmates for her demeanor mild

And all of us who knew her felt ourselves blessed

 

One day she was late, which had never happened before

There was ‘flu going ‘round – had she caught a chill?

Breathlessly she appeared at the classroom door

I was worried, and asked if she were ill

 

She smiled most sweetly, and shook her curly head:

“We been busy castratin’ hawgs,” she said

The Axis of Petulance

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

The Axis of Petulance

 

The North Pole and the South Pole refused to speak –

They accused each other of being polarizing

A Village for Our Exile - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

A Village for Our Exile

 

Far is that City of God for which we hope

Here the cities of man in which we live

Glorious, but still only refugee camps:

Constantinople, Athens, London, Rome

 

Give us for our exile a village instead

A pub, a library, a shop, a little school

Cows and sheep grazing on the grass of the commons

A hay wain lumbering through the summer stream

 

Draught horses drinking from the little rill

In the ford below the slow-clacking mill

 

(Cf. John Constable, “The Hay Wain”)

Subverting Poetic Convention - poem (maybe subversive...)

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Subverting Poetic Convention

 

Given that the convention

Is to subvert convention

Then to subvert convention

Is to follow convention

 

Or we could craft poetry

With honesty and wit

And as for convention

Give not a thought to it

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Moderated Commentator - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Logosophiamag.com

Hellopoetry.com

Fellowshipandfairydust.com

 

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Moderated Commentator

 

How comforting to know that at the end of this plod

Despite each fault and flaw and fall and fail

We will be judged by our loving God

And not by the readers of the Daily Mail

 

(Cf. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards)

Raymond Massey in a Funny Hate - weekly column 8 January 2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Raymond Massey in a Funny Hat

 

Recently I was a bit under the weather and so was confined to quarters.

 

I don’t know why we say “under the weather”; we all live with weather. We can’t be under or over or beside the weather; the weather simply is.

 

Anyway, while I was under the same weather as everyone else and serving as a warm pillow for the dachshunds I found myself idling before the Orwellian telescreen and marveling at the images and sounds.

 

I hadn’t watched Rawhide since I was a rug-rat and was happy to ride again with Mr. Favor, Rowdy, Wishbone, and all the lads herding sophomores to Sedalia, Missouri.

 

Rawhide was one of the most popular television shows from 1959 to 1965, and with its quality production values and writing attracted some of the best American and international actors as guest stars.

 

We remember Frankie Laine’s full-voiced, high-octane, yee-haw rendering of the theme song but tend to forget that the music for the series was written by Dimitri Zinovievich Tiomkin. Tiomkin was either Ukrainian or Russian, depending on contemporary politics and borders, and wrote the music for a generation of Hollywood films, including many for John Wayne.

 

Wagon Train, 1957 - 1965, in many ways parallels Rawhide as a pilgrimage or quest featuring a solid core cast and a brilliant series of guest stars.

 

One of the stranger Wagon Train episodes, Princess of a Lost Tribe, has scout Flint McCullough (Robert Horton) encounter a lost tribe of Aztecs and the requisite beautiful princess on a mysterious mountain. Montezuma IX (Raymond Massey in a funny hat) is a descendant of Montezuma and he and Flint have several clunky discussions on the nature of faith and sacrifice. The dialogue is groan-worthy, but Massey and Horton manage to keep straight faces throughout.

 

In the end Flint wins the princess’s heart but some bad Aztecs rip it out as a sacrifice to the gods after killing the good Montezuma. Flint escapes down the mountain mourning the most beautiful woman he has ever known.

 

Now all of this sounds silly and cheesy and impossible, like a lesser Edgar Rice Burroughs story or a Star Trek episode, and it is. One simply accepts it as a yarn.

 

But then for something truly silly and cheesy and impossible on television, there was the House of Representatives.

 

-30-

An Accident in the Scriptorium - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

An Accident in the Scriptorium

 

One of the monks fainted, and bruised his head;

“This copier is broken,” Brother Armarian said

The Machine Pauses (and then Restarts) - Three Days in ICU

 Lawrence Hall

mhall46184@aol.com

The Machine Pauses (and then Restarts)

 

Within a Dark-Lit Egg

 

Mechanical Air

Mechanical Light

Electronic Beepings

Procrustes is a Short, Bitter Man Who Doesn’t Like Anyone

 

Mechanical Air

On the day Papa Benedict died

I lived

And so prayed with him

As the electronics beeped in the new year

 

Mechanical Light

A crucifix on the wall faded away

And gas was silent in a tube

And when the haze was gone

The crucifix was still there

 

Electronic Beepings

BeepBEEPBEEPBLEEP beep                 beep

beepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeepbeep

I turned to my wristwatch

But it was dead

 

Procrustes is a Short, Bitter Man Who Doesn’t Like Anyone

Tubes in both arms, and arms must not be bent

Hard plastic bubbles beneath weary sheets                

A plastic paddle of obscure call buttons

There is no time within no time

 

All made better

 

Heilige Elisabeth von Thuringen

And those who serve with her

Quiet voices beyond the door, beside the bed

Soft footfalls hastening to come to us

With baskets from the Lord’s table

 

 

 

(Cf. The Machine Stops, E.M. Forster)