The World in Your Hands - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The World in Your Hands

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

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

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

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

"Dear Valued Customer" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Dear Valued Customer”

Dear Valued Customer:

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

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

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

Hobo Jungle - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Hobo Jungle

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

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

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

Christmas in Exile - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Christmas in Exile

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

-Gray, “Elegy in a Country Churchyard”

-30-

Saint Garden Gnome - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Saint Garden Gnome

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

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

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

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

Hello Poetry - unreliable

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

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

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

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

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

Cheers,

Lawrence

Vouchsafest Thou? - just for fun

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Vouchsafest Thou?

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

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

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

Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago

for two friends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On the Vigil of the Nativity

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

            “Why Are You Here?”

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

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

Pilgrimage Along the A1, from Peterborough to Chesterton - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Pilgrimage Along the A1

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

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

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

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

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

A Bitcoin for Your Thoughts? - column

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Bitcoin for Your Thoughts?

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

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

+ + +

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

+ + +

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

+ + +

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

+ + +

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

+ + +

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

+ + +

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

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

+ + +

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

-30-

Happy Merry Hallothanksmas - column

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Happy Merry Hallothanksmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-30-

The Insolent Gas Pump - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Insolent Gas Pump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But never gas pumps.

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

We just can’t have that.

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

You know Curt; we all went to school together.

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

-30-

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

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“Found a Dead Body This Mornin’ Early”

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

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

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

The Talking Gas Pump Down at the Conoco - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

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

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

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

In a whisper:

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

The Plane, the Mist, and the Moon - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Plane, The Mist, and the Moon

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

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

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

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

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

On an Inscription from Katya to Gary

in a Pushkin Anthology Found in a Used-Book Sale

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

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

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

Advent Remains Unoccupied - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Advent Remains Unoccupied

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

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

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

Dreams Ride the Rails like Hoboes from the Past - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

An Empty, Rusting Boxcar

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

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

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

Historic Presidential Tweets

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The President Tweeted his Outrage

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

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

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

But now - the tweet stops here

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