An Earlier Catholic Scandal - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“So Tell me, Judas;

Where do You See Yourself Ten Years from Now?”

Judas is an apostle on the go
Building his resume’, a better gig
Always part of his strategic focus
Going places, a young man on the move

Proactive for the Second Century
His paradigm shift of transparency
A next-generation strategy plan
In today’s competitive marketplace

Thirty Tyrian shekels; that’s the amount -
Laundered through a secret offshore account

Privileging the Narrative of Tea - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Privileging the Narrative of Tea

Whatever might a performance tea
                                                                   be?
Whatever are electrolytes to you
                                                                   and me?
No antioxidants will ruin our night
                                                                   all right?
And hydration is itself a fright
                                                                   Quite!

Blowing sleet rattles against the window pane
And the electrics have again winked adieu
But light the gas and brew up, black and plain
We’ll drink our tea by candles, with a biscuit
                                                                    or two

In nice China cups, or a mason jar

Because

The best tea of all is a cuppa char

(Upon reading a ‘vert for specialty teas)

The Land of L. L. Bean - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Land of L. L. Bean

How wonderful to live in Freeport, Maine
Where beautiful women and handsome men
In youth eternal rock their five-bar boots
And flannel shirts in happy, snowy scenes

Where laughter echoes through those forest glades
Forever free of electrical lines
Skunks burrowing under the cabin floor
And neighbors’ overflowing septic tanks

Oh, what a dreamy life for you and me
In Freeport, Zip Code 04033!


(Just having a little fun; everything I’ve bought from L.L. Bean’s catalogue is wonderful! I’d love to live in the perfect New England scenes depicted in the catalogue. If you squint your eyes carefully you can see Bob Newhart’s inn on page…)

Her Batlike Wings Pulsing Malignantly - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Her Batlike Wings Pulsing Malignantly

The nectar of youth from which the hummingbirds fed
In the joyful sweetness of their morning flights
Now sullies and sours the afternoon hours
Through bitter infestations and corruptions

Its former clarity corrupted now
Trapped in a tube of stagnation and rot
And scavenged by a malevolent wasp
Her batlike wings pulsing malignantly

But there is always hope: new songs, new words
In the morning’s return of sweet hummingbirds

A Child Curls up into a Little Ball - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Child Curls up into a Little Ball

In fear a child curls up into a ball
A very little ball, a little soul
Desperately seeking approval, and love
And given only disapproval, and blows

Hiding a favorite toy from a screaming purge
Childhood vaporized in an angry hour
Withdrawing into books and shining dreams
Withdrawing behind a fear-frozen face

Forever

Somewhere out there, discarded in the wild
Brave toy soldiers wait for a little child

A Letter from the Bishop - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Letter from the Bishop

Click to make a gift

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Click to make a gift

My sadness, anger, and shame concrete plan
I will travel to Rome third-party reporting
Mechanisms examining specific
Options advocate concrete proposals

Click to make a gift

Expertise relevant disciplines need
Such tools already exist our structures
Must preclude criterion zero tolerance
Outreach psychological development

Click to make a gift

This is the church house, this is the steeple
Where the Bishop dumps words upon the people

Click to make a gift

The Foul Stench of Summer - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The Foul Stench of Summer

From an idea by Jean Fisher

Six months of gasping, sere, soul-sucking heat
Blood-sucking mosquitoes, venomous snakes
And fetid, lung-drowning humidity

I loathe the summer, and I care not if
That wretched season goes away in silence
Or in noise -
                           only that it GOES AWAY

When High-Tech Goes All Manual Typewriter on You - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

When High-Tech Goes All Manual Typewriter on You

Did you hear the one about the man who walked into a ‘phone store and was greeted immediately?

Really, it happened.

Within my aging MePhone there was an email failure somewhere along the Verizon / Apple / AOL continuum which I was unable to resolve by following the instructions on various InterGossip sites.

With a desperate prayer on my lips and after bidding farewell to friends and family (can you hear me now?), I closed out my business affairs, packed what I thought I would need for a long sojourn in the wilderness of hard plastic chairs, and bid farewell to the past.

I took my existential despair and distressed MePhone to the Verizon store in Jasper, Texas, and as I entered - a staffer immediately stood up, smiled, and offered to sooth the wounded ‘phone.

Hey, if I am false in this matter may I be subjected to the agony of an eternity of Marty Haugen hymns.

I’m not kidding. I walked into a ‘phone store. A staffer stood up, smiled, and greeted me. Immediately.

In a world where customer service is more and more a grudging grunt from an unraised head behind a computer, this was a moment of joy, not unlike the Pilgrim’s Chorus from Tannhauser.

The staffer then listened to me – as in LISTENED TO ME - worked mysterious wonders with my MePhone, consulted briefly with another staffer, solved my problem within mere minutes, and thanked me for visiting Verizon.

Really. This happened.

Upon returning home I determined to send an email to Verizon praising the customer service at their Jasper store.

I accessed Verizon’s official webfootsite and soon realized that I was K in Kafka’s Das Schloss – access would be forever denied. Verizon told me that my access code, the one I have used for years and which the young staffer employed successfully only hours before, was not really my code. Not only would I have to give Verizon the right code, which would not be the right code, I would have to join a club or something.

Verizon does provide a physical address so that a grateful customer can send them a letter. A letter, with a stamp. Typed on a sheet of paper. So high-tech, eh?

Apparently the one thing impossible with Verizon is sending them an ordinary email complimenting the excellent customer service at one of their stores.

But then, perhaps the concept of good customer service is alien to corporate structures.

Anyway, thanks to the nice folks at the Jasper store for coaxing my MePhone into lighting up and making noises again.

-30-

Prelates and Presidents: The Summer of 2018 - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Prelates and Presidents: The Summer of 2018

An urgent message that was never written
Was then not left beneath the third lantern
On an arching bridge that was never built
Under a wondrous river that never flowed

And men wondered at the unwritten words
They could not find atop the fourth lantern
In an echoing tunnel never dug
Over the steppes east of an eastern shore

And the message never written did not say:
O prelates and presidents – for whom do you pray?

Argument over Wal-Mart Parking Space Leaves One Dead - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Argument over Wal-Mart Parking Space Leaves One Dead

-headline

                    And how can man die better
                       Than facing fearful odds,
                       For the ashes of his fathers,
                       And the temples of his gods

-Macauley, Lays of Ancient Rome

An argument over a parking space –
Lest all the pink Chinese flip-flops are gone
Triple-wide thongs in naughty, frothy lace
And a rhinestone case for a new MePhone

Cartoon shirts from the Vietnamese, sippy cups
Nicaraguan underwear and funny hats
Squeaky plastic toys for the little pups
And genuine autographed tee-ball bats -

There are causes for which a man might die
But “Ten Percent Off!” is no battle cry

Manichaeism is Quite Wrong, You Know - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

Manichaeism is Quite Wrong, You Know

“…without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then….”

-Ivan, The Brothers Karamazov

If there are no boundaries, there is no freedom
With nothing to push against, one’s strength must fail
If God is not, then one can make no plaints
And must take on a burden that can’t exist

If man is never told no, there is no Yes
For him to answer then against the no
And if there is no Yes, there is nothing at all
There is no dichotomy, only the Yes

If there are no boundaries, there is no Yes
And man must cease in silent nothingness

The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Beach House - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Beach House

Your Eminence:

Speaking of apostolic poverty
From the queen bed in your apostolic beach house
To those working two jobs to make life happen
Is pretty thin gruel –
                                     serve it to someone else

A Rabbi Tells a Story - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Rabbi Tells a Story

Once upon a time:

An aged rabbi talking with two men
Asked them about their holiday in Paris

The first man said: Oh, I hated Paris
There was muck and filth everywhere I went
Stray dogs and prostitutes roamed the foul streets
And the Parisians were incessantly rude

The second man said: Oh, I loved Paris
There were flowers everywhere I went
Artists and beauty, writers scribbling away
And the Parisians were so kind to me

And so:

The rabbi said to them (his voice was kind):
Each of you found the Paris you wanted to find



(Worked up [or down, or sideways…] from a story Rabbi Joel Goor, a visiting lecturer at the University of San Diego in 1975, told his students.)

No. - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

No.

Dixit ergo Iesus ad duodecim, “Numquid et vos vultis abire?”

“Will you also go away?” He asks us.

                                                                 No.

Only sinners mourn at the foot of the Cross
Only sinners approach the baptismal font
Only sinners recline at Table with the Lord

To whom shall we go?
                                      An empty shopping mall?
A 501C cafeteria?
A feast of ashes with the cardinal?

                                                                  No.

There is only one Place, one Space, one Grace

Only sinners are invited, and so
Our yes to Him – we will not go

"To Write Poetry of No Political Significance Whatever" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

“To Write Poetry of No Political Significance Whatever”

“But my chief argument in defence of Wang An-shih is that…he retired from the Court decisively, ignored  all recalls, and took to the mountains to write poetry of no political significance whatever.”

– David Warren on the poet-philosopher Wang An-Shih

Recusancy is not pious quietism;
In silence it is a brave voice withdrawn
From pompous Kratos’ halls of treachery
From screaming Demos’ marketplace of noise

And up into the silent hills to save
Something of civilization, to sing
Matins among the mountain mists, to write
A page in praise of Creation, to live -

Recusancy is not quietism at all;
It is a firm rebuke to tyranny

The Platonic Ideal of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful - photograph

While Dressing for an American Legion Meeting - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

While Dressing for an American Legion Meeting

A pair of slacks, a pair of shoes, a shirt
A watch to count the weary meeting hours
Coffee with comrades in the old church hall
And all of these are very good indeed

But like old shoes, old pals, the scenes of youth
We must someday let them all go, and pass
Peacefully, one prays, through the spray and foam
And sail until dawn to that farthest Shore

Where only the NCOs must dress right, dress
And the coffee’s always fresh in the company mess


(But will the smoking lamp will be lit?)

A Poetry Installation at the Temple of the Muses - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

A Poetry Installation at the Temple of the Muses

 

              Number Forty Two: “You're trying to undermine my rehabilitation. Disrupt my social progress!”

              Number Six: “Strange talk for a poet.”

-The Prisoner, “A Change of Mind”

Installing a poem to factory specs
Setting iambic feet into concrete
And lifting adverbs to the tops of verbs
Through the use of heavy machinery

Metaphors must be government-inspected
For solidarity with the collective
And images most closely interrogated
For their relevance to the latest cause

The Good, the True, and the Beautiful

As cleared by United Auto Workers Local 2110
So you’d better like it; youknowwhatI’msayin’

Bridge of Sorrows - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Bridge of Sorrows

Last week the Ponte Morandi, a modern bridge of interstate highway proportions, collapsed in Genoa, Italy. Thirty-nine deaths are known as of this scribbling

The Ponte Morandi was only 51 years old. Built according to the latest scientific principles and to a daring design by a civilization whose architecture, manufacturing, and design have earned the world’s admiration for centuries, the bridge failed and fell.

And yet in the area around Genoa, possibly in site of the wreckage, are bridges 2,000 years old. They don’t take big trucks because they weren’t meant to do so, but they still serve. The Ponte Morandi was meant to take big trucks, and did so for something less than 2,000 years.

Someone on the science / maths continuum looks at a bridge and considers the design according to the site and the various stress loads that will be made. Dr. Science then considers the quality of the materials and the professionalism of construction.

Someone else, that guy who thinks math is unscriptural because Jesus never told us to solve for X, looks at the same bridge and exclaims, “How pretty!”

But even the science-challenged among us can look at pictures of the Ponte Morandi and perceive that something was wrong in the design. The masses of concrete appeared to have been flung out too far between supports given that concrete is a glue of minerals and very heavy, with little tensile strength, and the spindly supports were inadequate for the load. Further, there seems – seems, and only from the pictures – to have been little provision for sway in any direction and from any cause. We all remember from Mr. Johnson’s sixth-grade science class that a triangular form will support more weight than a square because in a triangle the three sides each provide the anti-sway factor for each other, whereas the corners of a square are only hinges.

Engineering is the study of, among other things, bridge-building, real bridges, not metaphorical ones. The liberal arts, quite unfashionable these days, in their turn ask us if a bridge is needed in a given place so that people and trade can transit an obstacle and contribute to the common good, or if it is a political bridge to nowhere. The liberal arts – the fuzzy studies – also remind us that bridges have been built before, and if a bridge built 2,000 years ago still functions as a bridge we might want to apply our higher order thinking skills to learn how, and then apply the abstract principles to the specific needs of our own construction.

The two supports that converge on the apex of a triangle need each other in order to work; similarly, both hemispheres of our brains also need each other in order to work.

All that is something to think about while zipping along the long, concrete spans of our own flyover bridges whose footings are in swamps and bayous.

-30-

Barnum's Non-Human Animal Companions - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Barnum’s Non-Human Animal Companions

Nabisco, now a subsidiary of Mondelez International, which used to be Kraft Something-or-Other, grovels to The Loud People Who Are Against Things to prove that it is a good corporate comrade. Nabisco has redesigned its famous circus trailer cookie box to free the cartoon animals from their cartoon cages.

Barnum’s Animal Crackers are little cookies shaped like animals. In your ‘umble scrivener’s youth they were packaged in a little box printed as a circus wagon. The wheels of the wagon continued from the sides to the bottom and were perforated as cutouts so that the little wagon could stand on its four wheels. Printed on the sides of the box were cages of critters which varied from time to time, but the essential nature of the box, complete with a little string for carrying it or hanging it from a Christmas tree, didn’t change until The Glorious Ever-Now.

This month Barnum’s animals are free of their cages, roaming in good fellowship across a printed veldt. The gorilla, being somewhat arboreal, is probably unhappy about this. All the animals, both arboreal and nonarboreal, carnivorous and herbivorous, stroll toward the viewer in oneness ‘n’ peace ‘n’ love, surely wanting a hug.

That famous rhetorical question still obtains: how many people has Walt Disney killed?

As the old alligator might say of its latest human meal, “New Look – Same Great Taste!”

Now that the cartoon animals are free to roam, perhaps someone could redesign our cities, beginning with Chicago, so that the humans could also roam free.

Given that the Mondolez-Nabisco Barnum’s Animals box has been purged of anti-social elements, the animal cookies inside could be next.

Instead of little lions and tigers and bears (oh, my!) the cookies could be shaped as carrots and kumquats and corn (oh, ich!), and made from reprocessed soy beans. The boxes could be printed with inspiring mottos: “Good Little Comrades Love Brussels Sprouts” and “Good Little Comrades Report Global-Warming Detractors to their Block Wardens.”

On one side of the box could show pictures of happy children being devoured by bears and alligators, with the enlightening reminder that “Good Little Comrades Always Remember That Animals Were Here First.”

And now we turn to the cultural insensitivity of Eskimo Pies.

-30-