Red Sunrise - photograph

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

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Meditation Upon Matters of Faith

And the Worthy and Diligent Study

of the Arcana of Mathematics

as Recommended to Industrious and Thoughtful

Young Men and Women

For Kyle,

Who is Enduring His First College Maths

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

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

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

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

But still…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

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

A Scene from a Hospital Waiting Room

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

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

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

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

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

Feast of the Epiphany - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Feast of the Epiphany

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

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

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

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

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

Russian Children on Christmas Eve - poem

Russian Children on Christmas Eve

Good children dress warmly to watch for the star
The star of Bethlehem, the shepherds’ star
The star of the magi, true-guiding star
And more than all of these, the children’s star

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

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

S rozhdyestvom Hristovym!


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

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snowlight - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Snowlight

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

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

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

Down at the Auto Repair - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Down at the Auto Repair - A Waiting Room Discourse

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

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

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

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

Meditation on a Ten-Dollar Timex Watch - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Meditation on a Ten-Dollar Timex Watch

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

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

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

Is the End Near for Religion? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Is the End Near for Religion?

-news item

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

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

No consecration will ever obtain
Upon the altar of a microchip

A New Day of Freedom - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A New Dawn of Freedom

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

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

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

Janus Laughs - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Janus Laughs

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

Man Screams at Trump Robot Doll - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Man Screams at Trump Robot Doll

-news item

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

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

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


1 1984

The Beggar at Canterbury Gate - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Beggar at Canterbury Gate

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

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

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

Hitler's Ride is for Sale - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Hitler’s Ride

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

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

Next year’s model will be made in China.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And his car – simply to die for.

But who would want that thing?

-30-

Rachel, Weeping for Our Children - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Rachel, Weeping for Our Children

From an idea suggested by Kelly Rogers

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

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

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

The Desperate Princewives in Toronto - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Desperate Princewives in Toronto

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

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

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

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

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

Children Visiting for Christmas - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Children Visiting for Christmas – a Tragedy in Two Parts

I. A Mother to Her Child

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

II. A Child to His Mother

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

Within the Octave of Christmas - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Within the Octave of Christmas

For Eldon Edge, Patron of Christmas Bonfires

The wan, weak winter sun has long since set
And on the edge of stars a merry fire
Sends sparks to play among the tinseled frost
That decorates the fields for Christmas-time.
Within this holy octave, happy men
Concelebrate with beer, cigars, and jokes,
This liturgy of needful merriment.

Because

The Holy Child is safe in Mary’s arms,
Saint Joseph leans upon his staff and smiles,
The shepherds now have gone to watch their sheep,
And all are safe from Herod for a time.

Our Christmas duty now is to delight
In Him who gives us joy this happy night.

But the Animals were First - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

But the Animals were First

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

and the ass the master’s crib….’”

-Papa Benedict, The Blessings of Christmas

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

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

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