Lenin's Dream

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Lenin’s Dream

Imagine slaves buying their chains
Proudly bragging about their chains
Prettily decorating their chains
Gloriously celebrating their chains
And accessorizing their chains

Waiting patiently in long queues
All lined up by ones and by twos
Uniform in their chemical shoes
Beast-marked with their camp tattoos
Obedient to the latest news

Desperate for the latest ‘phone
Desperate never to be alone
Desperate for approval shown
Desperate for a cool ring tone
Desperate not to be unknown

Canary in a Coal Mine

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Canary in a Coal Mine

If a canary dies, who notices?
One little bird, of no significance -
Except for a specific circumstance -
Sacrifices its life to tell a tale.

If two canaries die, who notices?
Two little birds, of slight significance -
Except for a specific circumstance -
Sacrifice their lives to caution us.

If all canaries die, who then is left
To grasp, to gasp the truth learned far too late -
Civilization dies one canary at a time
Tiny corpses littering the mine.

Semester Exam

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Semester Exam

Fluorescents flicker and fall upon bowed heads
And printed letter-paper, organized
By title, paragraph, number, and line,
Interrogations set in Bookman Old Style

And then words fall, flung bravely to each sheet
As desperate, inky thoughts flailing for breath
While to battered be by split infinitives
Demanding an A, praying for a prom date.

Janus Laughs

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Janus Laughs

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

Quebec's Separation Anxiety

Mack Hall, HSG
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Separation Anxiety

Second only to the matter of the missing Malaysian aircraft and Miley Khardassian’s missing clothing, the world is seriously concerned about what small province should be attached to what country.

We refer, of course, to Quebec, whose elected provincial government on occasion reminds one of the 18-year-old cheerleader who sued her parents for not understanding her preciousness enough to give her lots and lots of money.

Once upon a time France was the gros chien of European colonizers in North America east of the Rio Grande. The English, Dutch, and Spanish possessions were relatively small beachheads surrounded by the huge territories that were Nouvelle-France.

Three hundred years later all that is left of France in North America is St. Pierre et Miquelon (http://www.st-pierre-et-miquelon.com/en/), a few small islands off the coast of Newfoundland. As an aside, while all history is fascinating, the brilliant 1941 Christmas eve raid by the Free French on what Secretary of State Cordell Hull dismissed as “two rocks” is a wonderful story (http://www.amazon.com/Free-French-Invasion-Miquelon-Affaire/dp/096842290X).

With the defeat of the French at Quebec in 1759, and then nasty little Napoleon’s sale of the rest of Nouvelle-France, about one-third of the present USA, in 1803, France was pretty much through in North America. But was all that land Napoleon’s to sell? Besides the reality that Napoleon was a usurper and a tyrant with no legal claim to anything, Spain too said all that territory was theirs.

None of them asked the First Nations who owned it, of course.

Which leads the reader back to Quebec, Canada’s largest province, though it is smaller than Nunavit, which is a territory and not a province, and Canada is confusing.

A look at the map reminds the reader that Quebec, all by itself, is a great big ol’ chunk (grand vieux marceau) of Canada. In the 1960s and 1970s a Francophone separatist movement, through murder and intimidation, generated a civil war in the province which was resolved through mass arrests, tanks in the streets of Montreal, and curious and confusing compromises with the federal government and internally.

Quebec has since voted on independence from the rest of Canada several times, so far choosing to remain, but once again the Parti Quebecois is pushing the matter.

No one seems to have asked the other Canadian provinces and territories if they wish Quebec to go away. Quebec suffers the highest taxes and the greatest debt (http://www.vigile.net/Quebec-debt-highest-in-Canada-and) of any state or province in North America. Only a few provinces are net providers of revenue to Canada as a whole, which means they must pay higher taxes to support the net takers. A visitor to Canada notes that the prices of goods there are quite reasonable until the tax is added – and there is the economic chienne-gifle.

What does all this have to do with the USA? A great deal. Canada is this nation’s biggest trading partner (http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/top/top1401yr.html). Not only that, Canada is the USA’s best friend; given the politics of our time, Canada may be our only friend. The border between Canada and the USA is artificial; the North American economy transcends that mapped but otherwise unreal line across the continent, and we really are one economy.

Instability and lack of leadership in the USA (the Keystone pipeline comes to mind) affect everyone from Nunavit to Mexico City. Similarly, instability and lack of leadership in Quebec affect everyone from Mexico City to Nunavit.

The Crimean peninsula is relatively important to us -- it is certainly important to the Crimeans – but the decisions the people of Quebec make in the next year or so are of immediate urgency to them and to us.

One wonders if a lonely little USA destroyer will appear in a “training exercise” among someone’s fishing nets along the St. Lawrence.

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Music Download on the Roof - A New Silent Musical

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Music Download on the Roof – A New Silent Musical

“Rabbi, is there a blessing for the Czar?”
“A blessing for the Czar – yes, on my ‘blog:
PAGE NOT AVAILABLE. CHECK CONNECTION.

A Catholic Funeral

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Catholic Funeral

Oh, our sister is dead; what is to be?
Shall we bury her with a Rosary?

No, those pre-Vatican II days are gone:
We’ll fold into her hands her new Iphone!

A Boy and His Dinosaur

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Boy and His Dinosaur

In another world, a silent world within,
The dominant species are dinosaurs.
Never having fallen, no evil obtains,
And beneficent reptiles live there as -
As innocently as butterflies.
In his quiet world of gentle reptilians
A little boy is never without a friend,
A Saurian with an unpronounceable name,
To share a cave, a thought, a book, a toy,
And so that world with a best-friend dinosaur
Is the child’s real world, the only one
Where he knows love.

The Westminster Chinese Chimes

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Westminster Chinese Chimes

An elegant clock ticks on the mantelpiece
Proclaiming the hours with an electric chime
Sarah thinks this violates household peace
And the cat, well, he can’t even tell time.

The Homeowners' Association

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Homeowners’ Association

For Robin

“Your attitude’s been noticed, comrade.”

- Block Warden to Yuri in Doctor Zhivago
-
When in chill autumn a golden leaf falls
The Homeowners’ Ass. sends an indictment
And if after five one vacuums the halls
The Homeowners’ Ass. yelps “Too much excitement!”

Then when in a rainstorm you park your car
The Homeowners’ Ass. alerts snooping eyes
And fines you because you’re an inch too far -
“Your attitude’s been noticed,” hiss the spies

Comes the spring, and the world turns to green
The Homeowners’ Ass. disapproves of your grass
Somehow it’s ragged, you know what we mean…
“Oh, go blow it out your Homeowners’ Ass.!”

Breakfast With a Granddaughter

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Breakfast with a Granddaughter

for Valentine

A four-year-old does not pencil you in
Or plan her day around a power lunch
Carefully scheduled in a little box;
Her calendar is filled with a pancake,
A slice of bacon crisp, a glass of milk,
The latter drawn way up, up, up the straw
And down again, puff, puff, a fountain of bubbles
Accented with the most glorious giggles
Ever to sail across the universe
And back again. Let’s have a refill of ‘em:
Giggles, please, already sweetened with joy.

The Greatest Gift of the Enlightenment

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Greatest Gift of the Enlightenment

A merciful machine is the guillotine
Empowering a compassionate society
To actuate therapy efficiently
Imagined by a diverse team of dreamers
Who saw what was why, and asked themselves why not
This greatest gift of the Enlightenment
Built using the latest technology
Sustainable wood from certified rainforests
And recycled metals crafted by artisans
Places the consumer at the center
Enhances higher order thinking skills
And promotes community values
Authentic ecosystem solutions
Embrace the needful progressive experience
A solution addressing social needs
And building teamwork across the spectrum
With voices for the voiceless voiced with love
And it all began with an idea, a dream
In someone’s kitchen, dorm room, or garage

The Enlightenment

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.

Vesting for the Office of the New Day

Vesting for the Office of the New Day

In the darkness of night Matins was sung
By the watchful few who rise for that Hour
And now at Prime most everyone is up
At dawning yawning for that courage-cup
With which to challenge back the challenges
Of this fallen world

Take thou a well-worn cross, of wood perhaps
Or maybe pewter stained with well-worn sweat
Or maybe silver plate or jewelers’ gold
Upon it place a kiss, and cross yourself
And slowly don the vestment of eternity
And turn to the sun

Peter, Paul, and Mary Reconsidered

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Peter, Paul, and Mary Reconsidered

In a re-sale shop in Jasper, Texas y’r ‘umble scrivener found a CD (a format now as dated as vinyl and electromagnetic tape) for a dollar, and crunched it into the player in his heritage (translation: old) car (because the machine makes a crunching sound when it eats music).

Magic!

Peter, Paul, and Mary, the group’s eponymous 1962 album, and their first, was issued on LP vinyl, which, like pay telephones, passenger trains, typewriters, and Kodak cameras, will require some exposition for those who aren’t card-carrying Medicare-istas.

The oeuvre might perhaps be labeled as folk, but while that style quickly deteriorated into hootenanny-ness, PP&M were never follow-the-fashions derivative. Neither are their songs self-indulgent therapies about themselves and their feelings; their songs are about work, play, justice, childhood, and beauty.

The songs of Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey, and Mary Travers were only part of the background top-forty a.m. music of your scrivener’s youth, but to his now mature ear they are perfection. The months of rehearsals are evident in the professionalism and cleanness of the performances. PP&M need no gimmicks, echo chambers, or layers of tracking; as true musicians they respect their audience and never lapse into curious noises.

The guitar has become a cliche' of folkabilly, casually slung over the shoulder of yet another 30-something hat-act posing mournfully on railroad tracks for a black-and-white publicity photograph, but the reality is that the legions of three-chord-commandos twanging wires are more annoying than musical. And, really, does anyone really stand on railroad tracks except for high school graduation pictures? Peter and Paul, though, respect the guitar, know the guitar, and rehearse the guitar. In a time when one often suspects that guitar is only a French word for kindling, PP&M remind us that there really are people who know that it is a musical instrument of great sophistication and potential, not an accessory.

And Mary - that voice! Crystalline! The notes to the album describe her, in language that would now be censored for its isms, “a bright, young blonde-and-a-half.” Oh, yeah. Mary never performed in her skivvies or mated with an amplifier; she didn’t have to.

The convention at this point in a narrative is to lapse into filler-language about how people could really sing and play music Back in the Day, but that is nonsense, of course. There are always professional artists who play music worthy of their audiences. There are not always audiences worthy of the artists.

Some criticism of the trio is valid – they allowed themselves to be used for propaganda, and Paul Stookey could be convicted of cultural manslaughter for the powder-blue-tux oozings of “The Wedding Song.” But when the organizers no longer needed Peter, Paul, and Mary, they were discarded as irrelevant and uncool. Their cosmic payback was “I Dig Rock and Roll Music,” which subtly mocked the pretensions of acts which had little to offer but junior-high locker-room language and look-at-me-me-me-ness.

Once upon a time, but definitely not in The Land of Honalee, a pal propped his dinky little transistor radio on some sandbags. The machine’s brave little 9-volt battery and its two-inch speaker, punching below its weight, were pushing out "500 Miles from Home" as broadcast from AFVN Saigon. The Chief didn’t like it, but then we didn’t like him. And, anyway, being 12,000 miles from home will get to you, too.

The gratitude is a little late, but thanks for that moment, Peter, Paul, and Mary.

-30-

The Carter, the Convicts, and the Railway

The Carter, the Convicts, and the Railway

 

“See all those workers digging through that hill?”

The carter asked, there pointing with his whip

While two mismatched old horses lumbered on

Jerking carter and prisoners along the ruts.

 

An empty church, its now skeletal dome

Open to the dusk, lay somewhat in the way

Of where the rails would lay, just there among

Stray stalks of wheat, from lost and windblown seeds.

 

One prisoner yawning through his sorrows said

“I wonder why the Czar didn’t send me there

To carve with pick and shovel and barrow and hod

His new technology across the steppes.”

 

“Too close to Petersburg, and Moscow too,

My lad.  The Czar wants you to labor far,

Far off.  No mischief from you and your books,

Your poems, your nasty little magazines.”

 

“Oh, carter, is Pushkin unknown to you?

Turgenev, Gogol, Dostoyevsky too?

What stories do you tell your children, then?

Do you teach them to love their Russian letters?”

 

The carter laughed; he lit his pipe and said

“You intellectuals!  Living in the past!

Education for the 19^th century -

That’s what our children need, not your old books.”

 

“Someday,” the carter mused, “railways everywhere,

And steel will take you where you will be sent.

Electric light will make midday of night

And Russia’s soul will be great big machines!”

 

“Machines, and better guns, and better clocks -

All these will make for better men, you’ll see.

You young fellows will live to see it; I won’t,

But what a happy land your Russia will be!”

 

And the cart rattled on, the horses tired,

Longing for the day’s end, and hay, and rest;

The prisoners made old jokes in laughing rhymes,

Begged ‘baccy from the carter, and wondered.

Some Observations on the Habits of the American Cardinal

Lawrence Mack Hall, HSG

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 seen at his side

 

And then one day

 

A few remnant feathers, a ripped cardinal’s hat -

He seems to have forgotten the watchful cat.

 

The Plains of San Agustin

Lawrence Mack Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
From The Road to Magdalena, 2012

The Plains of San Agustin

“And lean upon a peasant’s staff”

-Wordsworth

But rather lean upon a pilgrim’s staff,

And trudge the road to Magdalena, yes,
With Rosary in hand, wearing old boots
From some lost war, some long-lost time ago;
A canvas vade mecum for his gear,
A worn-out boonie hat against the sun,
The high-plains sun against the stars, upon
The track to Magdalena in the fall,
To listen to the spirits converse with clouds
Upon the Plains of San Agustin where
A Very Large Array of idols listens for
A voice from space, from far beyond the skies;
For there, if anywhere, He can be heard,
But not from painted idols, no, but from
The haunted earth, and from the stars and back
Again.  And then – and then shuffle away,
Stick tapping on the rocks, boots treading dust;
For if some stranger finds that stick, those boots
Abandoned in the brush some desert noon
And bones upon the sands like scattered words,
He’ll know a pilgrim made a happy end.

"Thank You for being Such a Valued Customer"

“Thank You for being Such a Valued Customer”

 

And, oh! Have we got a deal for you!

We looted a channel, we’ve raised your rates

We know you paid, but you’re still overdue

We teased you with some weekend movie baits

Which ought to be included anyway

We’re the worst service in history’s annals

We fu(dge) your contract almost every day

And

We want you to buy even more channels!

Major Pettigrew's Last Duck Hunt

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Major Pettigrew’s Last Duck Hunt

 

The annual shoot at the local estate is by itself worth the price of a copy of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson. 

 

Lord Dagenham, a worthy variation on P. G. Wodehouse’s eh-wot-oh-rather-don’cha-know Lord Emsworth, is a somewhat down-at-the-Rolls Royce noble who rents out much of his ancestral home to a private school and who is selling some of his lands to an American real estate developer.

 

The last annual duck hunt in the doomed countryside ends as a menace to the humans more than to the ducks.  The hunters, mostly English and American bankers playing at being squires for a day, are on the firing line when suddenly the field of fire is occupied by: (1) ducks, lots of ducks, (2) the schoolchildren, who raised the ducks as a science project and who rush in to defend them, (3) the gamekeeper and the farm hands, trying to round up both the children and the ducks, (4) environmentalists, and (5) the local Save Our Village protestors.  And, yes, someone gets bashed with a sign proclaiming “Peace.”  The reader sees that coming, and is delighted when it does.

 

A safe modern writer would have fitted all this into a scripted screed against guns and hunting, all kitted out with global-warming environmentalism and cuddly Disney children and animals.  Miss Simonson will have none of that; she makes fun of everyone involved, sparing not even the children: “’They killed our duckies,’ came a wail from a child holding up a bloody carcass.” 

 

As Lord Dagenham says, “I had no idea that fee-paying pupils would smell bad.”

 

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand is framed as boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back, only geriatric, but is saved from Famous Greeting Card Company sugar-free syrup by Miss Simonson’s lemony (seldom acidic) observations on socialists, yuppies, environmentalists, the upper classes, the lower classes, country clubs, the sort of people who resent country clubs, the Church of England, Moslems, Americans, Englishmen, artificial Christmas trees, hunters, anti-hunters, parties with themes, “the glass-squashed faces of small, angry children” on school busses, and flavored teas.

 

Through all this Miss Simonson develops a delightful love story.  The protagonist is Major Pettigrew, retired from the British Army, and his friend, Mrs. Ali, owner of the local shop.  Both are widowed, and they “meet cute,” as the film cliché goes, but their relationship must voyage from acquaintance through friendship and finally to love through 355 delightful pages of misunderstandings, cultural differences, disapproving relatives, disapproving neighbors, a retired banker “with an almost medical allergy to children,” organic turkeys, neighbor Alice’s organic vegetarian lasagna that smells like plankton, neighbor Marjory, whose sole topic of conversation is her gifted and talented grandson, a dotty vicar, the vicar’s even dottier wife, the aforementioned hunt, an annual club dance that deteriorates into a food-throwing, stage-collapsing, drink-sloshing brawl, a continuing sub-theme about a matched pair of Churchill shotguns, and a knightly rescue of an imprisoned lady.  And ducks.

 

The setting is a Wodehouse England that never really existed, flavored by Jane Austen, Kipling, Agatha Christie, the Romantic poets, Alexander McCall Smith, declasse’ climbers, and the occasional cup of real tea (no rose hips or other debris for our hero). 

 

Some of the social assumptions are a bit naïf, and in this the novel sails dangerously close to being approved of by famous television ladies, but this is a love story, after all, and one with a happy ending. 

 

Even so, with lines such as “The major wished young men wouldn’t think so much,” “a group of faded hippies, with ripped jeans and balding heads,” “Old Mr. Percy became so drunk that he threw away his cane and subsequently fell through a glass door while chasing a shrieking woman across the terrace,” and mention of an assistant imam named Rodney, this is a book that even manly men can read without fear of their boots magically dissolving into designer cross-trainers.

 

And there are ducks.

 

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, by Helen Simonson, is published by Random House.

 

-30-