Dici ei Pilatus: Quid est Veritas? - poem

Dicit ei Pilatus: Quid est Veritas?

Pontius Pilate was probably being flippant
When he asked of a prisoner, “What is truth?”

But he was an administrator, and so
He possibly did not know

Exclamation!!!!! Marks!!!!!!!!! - a frivolous but useful rhyming couplet

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Exclamation!!!!! Marks!!!!!!!!!!!!

One exclamation mark is right and proper
Add any more, and your thought comes a cropper

Real Cowboys Don't Forget the Oxford Comma - column

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Real Cowboys Don’t Forget the Oxford Comma

A sports team whose mascot is the cowboy is usually an unoriginal disconnect, copying the Dallas Cowboys who aren’t really cowboys anyway.

With the University of Wyoming, however, one understands that many of the students, both men and women, Arapaho, Crow, Lakota, Shoshone, and generic white people, grew up ridin’ and ropin’ on the High Plains. Their usage of the cowboy as a symbol is authentic.

One imagines a UW student being a little late for his Brit Lit 1302 class: “Dang, Hank, you forgot to take your spurs off.”

At the University of Wyoming a student can be ticketed by the campus cops for double-parking his horse.

The reality is that our Hank (or Chloe or SueAnn or Leonicio or Kimana or Yevgeny) is fluent in two languages, has applied for UW’s law school, and loves horsemanship.

The University of Wyoming (http://www.uwyo.edu/), with an enrollment of some 12,000, offers degrees and programs in law, engineering, education, biology, chemistry, psychology, earth sciences, mathematics, pharmacy, social work, and speech-language pathology. UW students come from all fifty states and ninety nations.

UW’s famous outdoors programs include rock climbing, white water rafting, ice climbing, snowshoeing, backcountry skiing, and mountain biking.

Unhappily for the real students, those with intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn as much as they can in the great matters of civilization, the campus is infected with a group styling itself The University of Wyoming Committee on Women and People of Color (http://www.laramieboomerang.com/news/new-uw-slogan-draws-criticism-from-faculty/article_acc18990-8242-11e8-911f-c3e97f4bc1bd.html).

The purpose of any group with so many words in its title is to be against things, in this instance, the use of “cowboy” as a mascot. Professor of Communications Tracey Patton has published a book on the subject entitled Gender, Whiteness and Power in Rodeo.

One notes that the learned professor does not employ the Oxford comma; for clarity and for parallelism in structure the title should read Gender, Whiteness, and Power in Rodeo.

Real cowboys don’t forget the Oxford comma.

From Tierra del Fuego to the Yukon, gauchos, vaqueros, charros, caballeros, picadors, and the First Nations horsemen who made themselves the world’s finest light cavalry can only smile in disdain at the ignorance of The University of Wyoming Committee on Women and People of Color in stereotyping the cowboy as a white-boy construct.

The concept of the cowboy in every language and culture is an ideal to which all should aspire: courage, strength, character, ruggedness, ethics, the ability to work alone when necessary, the ability to work together when necessary, horsemanship, iron-mongery, fence-building, agriculture, equine and bovine nutrition, veterinary skills, knowledge of weather and geography, cooking outdoors in all weathers, mathematics, report-writing, and dozens of other skills and skill-sets.

In stereotyping the horsemen of the Plains and of the world in their own false and narrow-minded construct, The University of Wyoming Committee on Women and People of Color deny noble strivings and positive identification with high ideals.

To paraphrase George Orwell, little boys and girls sit on the floor and play with toy cowboys and Indians; no little boy or girl ever sat on the floor and played with a toy committee.

-30-

Non Draco Sit Mihi Dux - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Non Draco Sit Mihi Dux 1

That wicked liar offers us a poisoned cup
In whose sheeny surface we see ourselves
Reflected in his cold imaginings
And not our own, in what we ought to be

There is another Cup for us, not this one
Just as there is a stone that must be moved
A bird of night to be repudiated
A thorny bush that burns, but not itself

A blessing breaks that false and bitter cup -
We share the one that God has lifted up


1 In English, let not the dragon be my guide; it appears on the medal of Saint Benedict as NDSMD.

The Awful Majesty of American Law, Free from the Tyrannies of Kings and Czars - doggerel

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Awful Majesty of American Law,

Free from the Tyrannies of Kings and Czars

Children shot daily despite our stern laws
But at least they are safe from plastic straws

Children shot daily, caught in street-gang fights
But at least they are safe from 100-watt lights

Children shot daily, high death rankings
But at least they are safe from parental spankings

Children shot daily, murdered by crooks
But at least they are safe from The Little House books

Children shot daily, may God bless their souls
And too our regulated toilet bowls

When Romantic Conventions Go Bad - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When Romantic Conventions Go Bad

O Dear Heart…or Pancreas…or some vital organ…

When I gaze into your ear canals
And cuddle you in my comforting feet
Oh, yeah, I wanna hold your earlobe
You make my sella turcica skip a beat

Your nostrils are so very soft to the touch
Your toenails are like silver-pale moonlight
Your elbows smell like roses in the spring
Your hair follicles are so sunrise bright

And when I meditate upon your liver
Cupid shoots every arrow from his quiver!

The Last of the Anna Apples - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Last of the Anna Apples

That lopper-thingie on the end of a pole
Indelicately intrudes among the leaves
Telescoped out, its harsh geometry
Unnatural among the greenery

There seeking out an elusive apple spared
The nightly browsings of the day-shy deer
Or the nightly pillagings of raccoons
Who destroy more than they will ever eat

But there’s that apple – careful, careful – snip:
And down it falls, with an apple-saucy flip!


(I nurture Anna-apple trees, which flourish in warm climates, and every June they bless me with bushels of sweet apples.)

News Item: Bananas Could Soon Become Extinct - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

News Item: Bananas Could Soon Become Extinct

Let the childhood dose of cod liver oil
Perish from its own sour smell and foul taste
Send yellow squash to the poor children in China
May Popeye keep his spinach to himself!

But not bananas!

The appeal of the peel, yes, what a deal!
A wrapper that children may throw away
A summer-yellow star sky-spiraling
Onto the garden grass (it’s good for the soil)

Alas, poor banana, joy to eye and tongue:
Why is it that the Cavendish dies young?


Note: the banana is not going away; the sustained monoculture of the Cavendish variant is said to make it increasingly susceptible to disease. If it fails, other varieties will be cultivated. As Rick did not say in Casablanca, “We’ll always have bananas."

The Theory and Practice of Summer - column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

The Theory and Practice of Summer

On Thursday last we were told that summer began at 0507 Central Standard Time (central to what and standard to what have never been explained).

At 0507 on the 21st of June in Anno Domini 2018 summer began. How does anyone know that? How is it that at 0506 we are in spring, and at 0508 we are in summer? What happened?

Y’r ‘umble scrivener proposes a truer means of determining summer, a joy from our childhood. All small children know, even if adults have forgotten, that summer begins when they open the kitchen door (no other door will do) and look out onto the happy new world that comes with the first Monday morning after the end of term. That is the first day of summer.

At eighteen, of course, a young man or young woman looks out the same screen door and realizes that he or she is just another unemployed American.

Beyond barefootin’ freedom, summer in Texas is better in theory than in practice. The advertisements feature happy families posing in the sunlight with paper plates and slightly carnivorous grins around a chromium grill the size of a Buick where Dad, in cartoon tee and ball cap and a made-in-China that says “Hail to the Chef,” burns hamburgers and wieners.

In this Sunday supplement world of summer there are no mosquitos, allergens, or rattlesnakes. No one sweats or faints because in the ads the air is free of soul-withering heat and damp, just as the children are free of heat rash, pustules, and sunburns that will erupt as skin cancer before they are thirty.

The unadvertised reality is that the kids will sleep late, gripe when made to get up for breakfast, gripe about the breakfast, and then sullenly resume Kill-Millions-of-Your-Fellow-Human-Beings videogames left incomplete in the middle of the night.

The household employed will have to get off to work as usual, reminding the older children to wash the dishes and a load of clothes, and they won’t.

If an especially energetic boy decides to shoulder his rod and reel and bicycle to the old fishin’ hole, his chances of being eaten by an alligator are much higher than in his parents’ time. Alligators are a protected species and, after all, by this infallible logic of posters to the U.K. Daily Mail, alligators were here first and so enjoy proprietary rights to human flesh.

Those few children who are rousted out of bed and required to cook, clean, wash, and maybe even help in the garden or fields are the blessed ones, though they don’t see it that way at the time. Children who are required – not yelled at and then ignored with a sigh – to help around the house learn self-discipline, a sense of duty, the decision-making processes to accomplish different forms of work, and an appreciate for the duties of grownups. Household chores are an element of love.

And children folding clothes are doing the dishes are less likely to be eaten by alligators, who seldom lurk by the washing machine or twist themselves around the vacuum cleaner.

-30-

A Tool of the Establishment - column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

A Tool of the Establishment

Stopping for bright, shiny things lying on the road is seldom a good idea, but since there was no other traffic on a rural road the other morning I stopped to pick up a bright, shiny thing.

Said bright, shiny thing is a spark plug wrench with a handle welded at a right angle. The handle can also be used as a flat-blade screw driver or a pry. The handle is stamped with “STIHL” and a sequence of numbers, so presumably this is a tool which came with one of Stihl’s highly-valued chainsaws.

Most such small-engine spark plug wrenches are double-ended, offering two sizes so that the tool can be packaged with different models. The pronounced asymmetry of this one suggests that the owner hacksawed off the other end, presumably to help manipulate the needed spark plug socket in an awkward space. Your mechanic could tell you many narratives about how the engineers who design gasoline engines sometimes seem determined that spark plugs be placed in almost inaccessible locations.

This wrench is a nice thing someone has lost off a trailer or a pickup, and I hope I can return it to the owner.

Hand tools are in themselves good, honest things, but are now mostly cobbled together out of pot metal in Shanghai, which is why hitting the yard sales for American, German, or Finnish tools is useful. Even if you don’t need another screwdriver, wrench, socket, or chisel right now, you will eventually, and you might as well pick up good used hand tools now instead of paying more for crumbly junk later.

Besides, you might run across some of the good stuff stolen from my garage by those among us whose concept of ownership of the means of production is more from Marx-Lenin-Stalin than from Jesus.

In an aside we may note that Marx, Lenin, and Stalin often spoke of the nobility of the working man, though like many of our modern leaders they seem never to have busted a sweat themselves except on the tennis court or the golf course. (Our state representative, James White, and our federal representative, Brian Babin, are intimately familiar with stringing barbed wire, shoveling ****, pushing a broom, and working the night shift to get through school. That is part of why they are work-boots-on-ground effective. I imagine many of their colleagues just don’t get it.)

There is no app for a properly balanced hammer, for the hammer is the app. It is not programmed, nor can it be recharged. A good steel file responds to the craftsman’s hands, not to a code. A wrench, once purchased, serves the careful owner for the rest of his life, and is not subject to a densely-worded and deceptive contract. Your grandpa’s pocket knife has lasted three generations without losing a satellite signal.

I will never be a good comrade, because I know that books (I’m speaking of Keats, Wordsworth, Lewis, Chesterton, Viktor Frankl et al, not Barbara Cartland [shudder]) are as essential to civilization as hunting, fishing, and good, honest work. This nation needs men and women in “all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war” (John Milton), men and women who know their way around Paradise Lost, the pea patch, iambic pentameter, and a good socket set.

-30-

Memorial Day Speech, 2018

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Memorial Day Speech Given at the Veterans' Memorial, Kirbyville, Texas, 2018

Mayor George, Judge Folk, Mr. Chandler, Mrs. Herrin,
Mrs. Freeman, Mr. Smith, Mr. Ozan, Mr. Kyle, Mr. Wood, Mrs. Bush, Doc Stanley, Chaplain Wiltshire, Mrs. Adams, Mr. Tibbits, veterans, honored guests, and all here today who love our nation.

Thank you for the honor of being with you today, and for asking me to speak very briefly.

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

Today we honor the loyal departed, both our home folks and all American servicemen and servicewomen everywhere.

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

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

As we now know, they were flying their aging C130 to Tucson to be scrapped. Some sources say the plane was 40 years old; some say 50 and some say 60. What we do know is that the plane was older than any of its crew.

I want to recognize these fine young men:

Major José Rosado, pilot

Major Carlos Serra, navigator

1st Lieutenant David Albandoz, co-pilot

Senior Master Sgt. Jan Paravisini, mechanic

Master Sgt. Jean Audriffred

Master Sgt. Mario Braña, flight engineer

Master Sgt. Víctor Colón

Master Sgt. Eric Circuns, loadmaster

Senior Airman Roberto Espada

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think we should do something about that.

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

In closing (and let the people say “At last!”), a few words from Lawrence Binyon, who in 1914 was in his fifties and so was too old to enlist. However, Mr. Binyon volunteered as a medical orderly, and served in forward hospitals up against the front, within artillery range.

Mr. Binyon was a writer, an art critic, and a good man, but he was perhaps not a very good poet. In 1914 he wrote “For the Fallen,” and most of it is forgettable, florid, late-Victorian parlor poetry. However, within this poem there are four brilliant lines, as brilliant as sharpened steel, which we have all heard. And they are worth hearing again now:

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

Thank you.

-30-

What's Wrong with America? It's the Shortage of Poker-Playing Dogs - column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

What’s Wrong with America? It’s the Shortage of Poker-Playing Dogs

What’s wrong with America?

Well, as Tevye the Dairyman didn’t say, I’ll tell you – everything went wrong when we got rid of the pictures of those poker-playing dogs.

The other day I visited to the salon of the nice lady who cuts my hair every two weeks, and realized that an essential facet of Americana was missing – pictures of dogs playing pokers, especially that great American classic, “A Friend in Need.”

Oh, sure, the licenses and health certificates are amusing reading (unless Texas laws have been changed recently, acquiring a balloon pilot’s license to take people up into the air and then drop them to their deaths is easier to acquire than a beautician’s license). Last month’s copy of Texas Monthly, fine, fine. It’s not Field and Stream, of course. Flowers, fine. Smelly candle-thingies, okay.

But what’s really missing is an uplifting picture of dogs playing poker.

Early in the twentieth century, Cassius Marcellus Coolidge, aka “Cash,” was a jack-of-all-trades but a master of painting anthropomorphic dogs for an advertising firm. His most famous series is known as Dogs Playing Poker (although his dogs were also known to play football and practice law), and they became a staple artistic statement in saloons, waiting rooms, and, most especially, barber shops.

It was poker-playing dogs that made America great.

As Keats would have said were he an American, where are the poker-playing dogs of yesteryear; aye, where are they?

When we had poker-playing dogs we still had a good ten-cent cigar.

When we had poker-playing dogs all our children were good, did their homework, helped out on the farm, and went to Sunday school.

When we had poker-playing dogs we had real battleships, by golly.

When we had poker-playing dogs our airplanes had propellers just as Wilbur and Orville intended, and not those funny-looking jet things.

But now that we’ve gotten rid of the poker-playing dogs, where are we? Hah?

We need those pictures of poker-playing dogs back, yes, sir. I think we should place them next to pictures of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in the classrooms of America.

When children pledge Allegiance to the Flag every morning they should be able also to see those poker-playing dogs, and be proud of what this great nation has accomplished in art.

Every barber shop and every hair salon in the Land of the Free should display poker-playing dogs as an inspiration to our fine young men and women.

Restore the poker-playing dogs, and make America unselfconsciously proletarian again!

Shave and a haircut – six bits!

-30-

The Troublesome Life and Lamentable Death of Christopher Marlowe - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Troublesome Life and Lamentable Death of Christopher Marlowe

Marlowe! Dark and dangerous Kit Marlowe
Whose hooded eyes, like a subtle serpent’s, held
In mysterious charms Hero, and too
Leander, perhaps, in the ways of night

And in the councils of foul Walsingham
Where innocence and guilt knew not each other
Through sly reptilian tangles of false oaths
Among the pale queen’s writhing coils of shame

Beneath which altar, then, or perhaps none
Was the famous reckoning paid, and done?

What's Wrong at Connie's Beauty Shop? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

What’s Wrong at Connie’s Beauty Shop?

For Connie, a Friend Indeed

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!
The health certificates make for dull reading
And last month’s issue of Texas Monthly
Has not the old cache’ of Field and Stream

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!
Among the snaps of Baby’s First Haircut
Children and grandchildren in cute little frames
And lovely young girls all styled for the prom

There are flowers and scents and catalogues

But –

There are no pictures of poker-playing dogs!

Woof!

The Stuffed Men Who Praise Our Soldiers on Independence Day - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Stuffed Men Who Praise Our Soldiers on Independence Day

1.

Stuffed men who never made a single day
Of training make brave speeches on this day

Surely each one of them has his reward -

A government SUV
And bodyguards
And a household staff
And a clean, dry place to sleep
And an income
And medical care
And a pension
And a book deal
And a library
And maybe an eternal flame

2.

And the nation’s enlisted daughters and sons
Who sweat among the rocks, not on the golf course

Have their reward from a grateful nation -

Taking cover behind a blown-up Hummer
They are the bodyguards
They dig holes in the rocks and sand
MREs contracted by the lowest brother-in-law bidder
They stand-to all night under fire
They are paid something less than the president’s special, um, assistant
They will be ignored by the DVA
Their eternal flame is the memory of a death-burnt friend
They are dismissed as millennials and snowflakes
          By the Keyboard Kommandos who learned about war
          Just like our stuffed men in Washington
          By watching Patton over and over

The stuffed men bray every hollow cliché,
But this is what the stuffed men really say:

“Thank you for your service; now shut up and go away

Until we want another photo-op on Remembrance Day”

Solzhenitsyn at Harvard - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Solzhenitsyn at Harvard

Some prophets spoke before the thrones of kings
And others at the gates of Jerusalem
One stood upon a rock and split the sea
And others heard God in the soft, soft wind

A prophet of our time at a table stood
Before a cafeteria table draped in cloth
Fronted a trinity of microphones
And split complacency that rainy day

Umbrellas were dripping, the sky was low
A prophet spoke to us, and we did not know

Should Children be Allowed to Watch This? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Should Children be Allowed to Watch This?

A woman. A knife. A very sharp knife.
She has waited for this hour, this moment
Her eyes – they gleam with passion dark upon
A figure recumbent upon a slab

She is not alone; she is being watched
But no one will dare cry for her to stop
They have all made their agreement, their bond
And now the woman lifts the knife…she strikes…!

She has cut the heart from an artichoke
And the studio audience applauds

Canada Day - Only Once a Year? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Canada Day? Just One?

With love from an ‘umble Yank

But every day is Canada Day!

The afternoon plane lands in Halifax
When the hatch is popped, cool air rushes in
Even the fog is happy in Canada

The Muskogee 1 never made landfall here
And so we pilgrimage for her, completing
Her voyage from ’42 to Canada

Wolfville, Grand Pre’, Le Grande Derangement
The Deportation Cross and beer cans
Well, God forgive the Redcoats anyway

Newfoundland
Is a bold
Anapest

The church spires in a line, the light is green
The bold young captain shoots the narrows wild
Can you find your way to your painted house?

To walk again the cobbles of Ferryland
And smell the very blue of the Atlantic
The sea-blown wind is cold in Canada

Blue Puttees and a mourning Caribou
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord
Good children sing “We love thee, Newfoundland”

Quebec – royal city of New France
May Le Bon Dieu bless the Plains of Abraham,
And may God bless
The signs an English driver cannot read

The Coca-Cola streets of Niagara Falls
Yanks laugh at made-in-China Mountie mugs
And buy them, happy to be in Canada

A cup of Toujours Frais from – well, that place
But to us in your southern provinces
Below Niagara, Tim too is Canada

Though Canada goes on, these scribbles must not –

Your grateful guest wishes only to say
That every happy day is Canada Day!


1 My mother's first husband, Claude Blanchette, was second officer on the oiler Muskogee, torpedoed with the loss of  all her crew while en route from the Caribbean to Halifax in 1942.  My wife and I took Mother to Halifax shortly before her death.

The 10,000-Year-Old Girl - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The 10,000-Year-Old Girl

She is a 10,000-year-old girl
Although she is rather younger today
Only 240 or so
While taking coffee with James Madison

She has discussed the weather with Gilgamesh
Given Keats her handkerchief for his cough
Danced with the fairies on Midsummer Eve
And captured the castle with Cassandra

Because she has listened when the Nine have sung
An old soul she is, and so
                                                          forever young

Soulfight in a Locked Room - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Soulfight in a Locked Room

In the end, they had to break into his room
He was dead in his chair, and quite alone
Self-exiled from his family for years
Alone in a shell, silent, and alone

The accidentals of life were cast away:
A coffee pot, a coat over a door
His schedule for the methadone clinic
A note to meet with his parole officer

But the pathologist’s tox screen was clean -
Better than most of us, he went down fighting