Saturday, May 9, 2020
The Unwilling Suspension of Belief - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Prelates, preachers, premiers, princes, and presidents
Now publish proclamations at the speed of lies
And just as rapidly retract them again
Regretting only their subjects’ lack of wit:
Obey The Science, whatever it is today
For it will be something else tomorrow
And so we need not fear our punishments
For the mistakes that our leaders never made
But, shhhhhhhhhhh…
If everything they teach is proven to be bluff
Then we must be the truth –
and we are enough
The reader will remember the concept of willing suspension of disbelief from drama, such as when the Prologue in Henry V urges the audience to imagine the “The vasty fields of France… / Within this wooden O...”
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Unwilling Suspension of Belief
Prelates, preachers, premiers, princes, and presidents
Now publish proclamations at the speed of lies
And just as rapidly retract them again
Regretting only their subjects’ lack of wit:
Obey The Science, whatever it is today
For it will be something else tomorrow
And so we need not fear our punishments
For the mistakes that our leaders never made
But, shhhhhhhhhhh…
If everything they teach is proven to be bluff
Then we must be the truth –
and we are enough
The reader will remember the concept of willing suspension of disbelief from drama, such as when the Prologue in Henry V urges the audience to imagine the “The vasty fields of France… / Within this wooden O...”
Friday, May 8, 2020
Like Far-Out Totally Drug Trippin', Man - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
A pill or two, inhaling funny stuff
Green stripes floating before and through my eyes
Oh, wow, dude, and maybe behind my eyes
The sixties regrooved in day-glow colored lights
Floating above this alien planet, I was
A dream aloft, or lofting up a dream
Shankaring that zitaring ups we go
That falls like moonbeams on a blue-slept sea
For an hour disharmony seemed resolved -
Oh, why does there have to be dentistry involved?
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Like Far-Out Totally Drug Trippin’, Man
A pill or two, inhaling funny stuff
Green stripes floating before and through my eyes
Oh, wow, dude, and maybe behind my eyes
The sixties regrooved in day-glow colored lights
Floating above this alien planet, I was
A dream aloft, or lofting up a dream
Shankaring that zitaring ups we go
That falls like moonbeams on a blue-slept sea
For an hour disharmony seemed resolved -
Oh, why does there have to be dentistry involved?
Thursday, May 7, 2020
So That's Why Texas Jails Beauticians - weekly column
Lawrence (Mack) Hall, HSG
So That’s Why Texas
Jails Beauticians
The concept of essential jobs and nonessential jobs
eludes many of us. If you have a job it’s an essential job because food,
clothing, and shelter are essential. Who
is it who sits enthroned on high with the authority from some planetary
overlord to determine whether your job is essential?
Beauticians, whose daily practices and spaces have always
been required to meet strict education, re-education, safety, health, and
hygiene requirements, have of late been shut down, shut out, and shut up, and when
several of them got all uppity about needing to work – work – have been
investigated and sometimes jailed (https://reason.com/2020/05/07/texas-governor-greg-abbott-will-not-jail-people-shelley-luther-for-violating-coronavirus-social-distancing/).
And we the people understand: law-abiding citizens must
be protected from wild-eyed barbers and beauticians wielding semi-automatic
assault scissors with 30-round banana magazines. No one knows the horrible
death rate inflicted on innocents by those out-of-control clipper-crazies.
Why can’t beauticians and barbers be more like, oh,
hot-air balloon pilots who charge people for flights?
According to the FAA (http://www.pilotfriend.com/training/flight_training/faa_bal.htm),
requirements to fly as a commercial balloon pilot begin with:
Subpart
E -- Commercial Pilots
·
The
age requirement for a commercial pilot certificate is 18 years.
·
Read,
speak and understand the English language.
·
No
medical certificate required. Same as paragraph 3 above.
·
The
applicant must pass a more advanced written test on the subject matter listed
in paragraph 4 above, additional operating procedures relating to commercial
operations, and those duties required of a flight instructor.
·
Advanced
training must be received from an authorized instructor including those items
listed in paragraph 5 above plus emergency recovery from a terminal velocity
descent.
·
The
applicant for a commercial certificate must have at least 35 hours of flight
time as a pilot, of which 20 hours must be in balloons, 6 under the supervision
of an instructor, 2 solo flights, 2 flights of at least one duration, and one
flight to 5000 feet above the take-off point.
The holder of a commercial
pilot's certificate may operate a balloon for hire and may give flight
instruction.
Want to go for a balloon ride?
According to the State of Texas, requirements to work as
a cosmetologist or barber (https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/cosmet/cosmetlaw.htm)
(pour yourself a cup of coffee; this is going to take a while) begin with:
OCCUPATIONS CODE
TITLE 9. REGULATION OF BARBERS, COSMETOLOGISTS, AND RELATED OCCUPATIONS
CHAPTER 1602. COSMETOLOGISTS
(Effective date September 1, 2019)
Table of Contents
These strict requirements wisely keep beauticians and
barbers from killing people by flying them into power lines or by dropping them
thousands of feet to their deaths when the balloon catches fire.
So, yeah, that’s why Texas jails beauticians.
-30-
Upon Release from Lockdown - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
With friends for lunch after two dreary months
How we looked forward to it! The neon café
Along the interstate, tourists and truckers
All waiting to be seated – how many, sir?
But how desolate it is in the dimness
Almost empty - half the furniture gone
No merriment, no hum of activity
One masked server, flickering about like a ghost
The road out past the empty parking lot
Leads to California. Maybe we should go
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Upon Release from Lockdown
But we keep a-comin’. We’re the people that live.
-Ma Joad, The Grapes of Wrath
With friends for lunch after two dreary months
How we looked forward to it! The neon café
Along the interstate, tourists and truckers
All waiting to be seated – how many, sir?
But how desolate it is in the dimness
Almost empty - half the furniture gone
No merriment, no hum of activity
One masked server, flickering about like a ghost
The road out past the empty parking lot
Leads to California. Maybe we should go
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
A Television Ad for the Virus Time - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Begin the same old insta-emo piano music; roll stock footage of beautiful, happy families having far more fun in isolation than you ever will.
Voice-over narrator in the slow, soft, persuasive tones we associate with some of our nation’s more accomplished mass-murderers:
We’re here for you we’re here to help together
Trust together we’re in this together
We care together we’re listening together
We will rise to the challenge together [Keep it SLOW]
The indomitable human spirit together
We’ll learn something about each other that
We just didn’t know before together
We are all on the same team together [SLOWWWW]
And when this is over, when we all smile again [Slow and then pause]
Together [SLOW and ‘WAY LOW, pause]
We’ll all buy a bottle of Bob’s Boysenberry Gin! [PATRIOTIC EXUBERANCE!]
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
A Television Ad for the Virus Time
Begin the same old insta-emo piano music; roll stock footage of beautiful, happy families having far more fun in isolation than you ever will.
Voice-over narrator in the slow, soft, persuasive tones we associate with some of our nation’s more accomplished mass-murderers:
We’re here for you we’re here to help together
Trust together we’re in this together
We care together we’re listening together
We will rise to the challenge together [Keep it SLOW]
The indomitable human spirit together
We’ll learn something about each other that
We just didn’t know before together
We are all on the same team together [SLOWWWW]
And when this is over, when we all smile again [Slow and then pause]
Together [SLOW and ‘WAY LOW, pause]
We’ll all buy a bottle of Bob’s Boysenberry Gin! [PATRIOTIC EXUBERANCE!]
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Water-Stained Pages in a Missal - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Crinkly, wrinkly pages in a missal
They’re water-stained – how did that come to be?
Maybe it was when the bishop visited
And sloshed us with his shaky aspergillum
Or when an infant at her baptism
Protested the proceedings with a splash
The stains might be from another child’s sippy-cup
Or a careless moment at the holy-water font
And so
The pages aren’t water-stained; they’re water-blessed
With beautiful mysteries – Word, water, and child
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Water-Stained Pages in a Missal
Crinkly, wrinkly pages in a missal
They’re water-stained – how did that come to be?
Maybe it was when the bishop visited
And sloshed us with his shaky aspergillum
Or when an infant at her baptism
Protested the proceedings with a splash
The stains might be from another child’s sippy-cup
Or a careless moment at the holy-water font
And so
The pages aren’t water-stained; they’re water-blessed
With beautiful mysteries – Word, water, and child
Monday, May 4, 2020
Dole (tm) Banana #4011 - MePhone Photograph
Dole Banana #4011. Is there a Dole Banana #4010? #4012?
"Dole Central Command to Banana #4011. Come in, #4011. I repeat, come in, #4011..."
(Thanks to Dole, my potassium level is where it should be.)
"Dole Central Command to Banana #4011. Come in, #4011. I repeat, come in, #4011..."
(Thanks to Dole, my potassium level is where it should be.)
Magnesium for the Militia Movement - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Declaration of Independence,
The Constitution, the Majesty of the Republic
Are ruined foundations upon which now squat
Clangery fat men and their tiny guns
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/495800-auschwitz-museum-condemns-nazi-slogan-at-re-open-illinois
(I wanted to write “Milk of Magnesia” in the title but that term is trademarked.)
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Magnesium for the Militia Movement
The Declaration of Independence,
The Constitution, the Majesty of the Republic
Are ruined foundations upon which now squat
Clangery fat men and their tiny guns
https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/495800-auschwitz-museum-condemns-nazi-slogan-at-re-open-illinois
(I wanted to write “Milk of Magnesia” in the title but that term is trademarked.)
Sunday, May 3, 2020
Most of Our Penguins are Scotch-Taped Now - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Civilization is sometimes held together
By the stern parsimony of Scotch Tape™
Which locks tattered covers and pages in bond
To await opening by old hands or young
Young is better; for we were young, and too
The world was young, and is, as Camelot
Sends forth each day noble adventures, ideas 1
In battle luminous against chaos and evil
Civilization is always held together
When old and young face the dragon in unity
1 An allusion to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Most of Our Penguins are Scotch-Taped Now
Civilization is sometimes held together
By the stern parsimony of Scotch Tape™
Which locks tattered covers and pages in bond
To await opening by old hands or young
Young is better; for we were young, and too
The world was young, and is, as Camelot
Sends forth each day noble adventures, ideas 1
In battle luminous against chaos and evil
Civilization is always held together
When old and young face the dragon in unity
1 An allusion to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King
Saturday, May 2, 2020
Where's MeeMaw? - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
She always gave her grandchildren kisses for luck
After their visits when she picked them up from school
After spoiling them with candy and sody-pop
Over the protests of her diet-conscious daughter
She always gave her daughter kisses for luck
“My house, my rules – I get to treat ‘em!”
“Oh, MeeMaw, you’ll turn them into rotten kids!”
“And you can feed them twigs and leaves at home!”
She always gave her grandchildren kisses for luck –
Her sheeted corpse was shoved into a rented truck
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/license-for-new-york-funeral-home-where-dozens-of-bodies-were-removed-from-trucks-has-been-suspended/ar-BB13ulp5
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Where’s MeeMaw?
“A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid.”
-Yevgrav in Doctor Zhivago
She always gave her grandchildren kisses for luck
After their visits when she picked them up from school
After spoiling them with candy and sody-pop
Over the protests of her diet-conscious daughter
She always gave her daughter kisses for luck
“My house, my rules – I get to treat ‘em!”
“Oh, MeeMaw, you’ll turn them into rotten kids!”
“And you can feed them twigs and leaves at home!”
She always gave her grandchildren kisses for luck –
Her sheeted corpse was shoved into a rented truck
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/license-for-new-york-funeral-home-where-dozens-of-bodies-were-removed-from-trucks-has-been-suspended/ar-BB13ulp5
Friday, May 1, 2020
The Last Supper as Takeout - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
His Grace the Bishop has given his blessing
To a drive-through Eucharist on Saturday night
From six to six-thirty in the parking lot
While maintaining distance and decorum
Maybe
With creamers, sweeteners, paper napkins, plastic straws,
Salt, pepper, sporks, and our super-secret sauce
In a paper sack bearing as a motto
A sentiment left over from last year’s Earth Day
Well, I will go and take and eat, not understand –
A little humility is always in order
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Last Supper as Takeout
The command, after all, was Take, eat; not Take, understand.
-C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
His Grace the Bishop has given his blessing
To a drive-through Eucharist on Saturday night
From six to six-thirty in the parking lot
While maintaining distance and decorum
Maybe
With creamers, sweeteners, paper napkins, plastic straws,
Salt, pepper, sporks, and our super-secret sauce
In a paper sack bearing as a motto
A sentiment left over from last year’s Earth Day
Well, I will go and take and eat, not understand –
A little humility is always in order
Thursday, April 30, 2020
The Poetics of Tomato Plants - weekly column
Lawrence (Mack) Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
30 April 2020
The enforced isolation of The Virus-Time has led y’r ‘umble scrivener to plant a garden and to read more poetry
The garden is mostly unplanned, for I meant to be happy with a few sunflowers and some tomato plants and my existing apple trees. However, a young friend who haunts the big-box stores at the ends of seasons brought me tomato seedlings, marigold seedlings, squash seedlings, nasturtiums (nasturtia?), lavender and other mints, zinnia seeds, a little mulberry tree, three little lemon trees, and two little apple trees.
With the lockdown I did not find sunflower seeds, and so scouted out old packets, including one I bought in South Dakota years ago, and while the germination rate was low, I have about twenty young plants who turn their heads to the rising sun each dawn. Biologists tell us that heliotropes don’t really choose to greet the sun; their DNA is programmed to blah, blah, blah. Poor biologists – they seldom perceive the magic.
Some of the squash failed, and I replaced them with eggplant I found at Darrell and Kathy’s The Barn in Kirbyville while buying a sack of chicken scratch for the birds and squirrels.
Curiously, I don’t care for about half these fruits and vegetables, feeling that if God wanted us to be vegetarians He would not have invented and blessed Jenny’s Fried Chicken and Sonic’s Breakfast Toaster. But tomatoes and such are easy and rather fun to grow, and are aesthetically pleasing in appearance.
I was raised on the farm, but this is about as agricultural as I want to get now, although I am a Life Member of the FFA courtesy of Jody Folk and Kirbyville High School. The FFA is a great program for young people, and teaches mature self-governance and mutual respect as a requisite for any activity, including raising cattle and crops.
After a few hours of dragging hoses these dry spring days, the cool, breezy late afternoons are perfect for lingering outside with a refreshing beverage and some of the books we perused only lightly and under duress in school.
Poetry was culturally significant in all social and economic classes in England, Europe, Canada, and the U.S.A. until after the First World War, whose death and desolation led to a cultural collapse that remains with us (https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature). The works of John Milton, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley (unhappy name), William Wordsworth, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling and thousands of published, unpublished, and parlour-poets celebrated all the challenges, sorrows, and victories of life. Every newspaper once published poetry, and all school functions featured original student work. If it was often clunky and derivative, well, practice is how we make good work in the end.
My uncle, Bob Holmes of happy memory, a farmer and dairyman, over coffee recited from memory John Milton’s “On His Blindness.” I’m not sure he finished high school, but he remembered this favorite from his boyhood.
Despite the post-war infestation of free verse (which is not verse at all), such poets as Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson (“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” George McKay Brown, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Wendell Berry, Claude McKay (his “If We Must Die” was quoted by Churchill in defiance of the Nazis), and so many others, in spite of fashionable despair continued to write poetry that addressed and celebrated the human condition meaningfully and skillfully.
In 1945 Field Marshal Wavell (https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/wavell), who in 1915 lost an eye (but never his true vision) at Ypres, published an anthology of poems that had been important to him in his military career. Despite its unfortunate title, Other Men’s Flowers (a quote from Montaigne), this little book demonstrates the strength and skill and muscularity of real poetry as opposed to the weak, self-pitying, I-I-I-Me-Me-Poor-Me free verse drivel now occupying shelf-space that could be used for something more substantial – Mickey Mouse funny books come to mind.
Those who teach at home (there are no such constructs, either as nouns or verbs, as “home school” or, worse, “homeschool”) or who work within more formal school situations, could hardly do better than to introduce a boy or girl to Wavell’s anthology from perhaps the fifth grade.
Poetry, like farming and the family, is part of the fertile soil of civilization, not an accessory.
Besides, the bees and hummingbirds will enjoy hearing you read to them.
That’s the latest buzz, anyway.
Mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
30 April 2020
The Poetics of Tomato Plants
The enforced isolation of The Virus-Time has led y’r ‘umble scrivener to plant a garden and to read more poetry
The garden is mostly unplanned, for I meant to be happy with a few sunflowers and some tomato plants and my existing apple trees. However, a young friend who haunts the big-box stores at the ends of seasons brought me tomato seedlings, marigold seedlings, squash seedlings, nasturtiums (nasturtia?), lavender and other mints, zinnia seeds, a little mulberry tree, three little lemon trees, and two little apple trees.
With the lockdown I did not find sunflower seeds, and so scouted out old packets, including one I bought in South Dakota years ago, and while the germination rate was low, I have about twenty young plants who turn their heads to the rising sun each dawn. Biologists tell us that heliotropes don’t really choose to greet the sun; their DNA is programmed to blah, blah, blah. Poor biologists – they seldom perceive the magic.
Some of the squash failed, and I replaced them with eggplant I found at Darrell and Kathy’s The Barn in Kirbyville while buying a sack of chicken scratch for the birds and squirrels.
Curiously, I don’t care for about half these fruits and vegetables, feeling that if God wanted us to be vegetarians He would not have invented and blessed Jenny’s Fried Chicken and Sonic’s Breakfast Toaster. But tomatoes and such are easy and rather fun to grow, and are aesthetically pleasing in appearance.
I was raised on the farm, but this is about as agricultural as I want to get now, although I am a Life Member of the FFA courtesy of Jody Folk and Kirbyville High School. The FFA is a great program for young people, and teaches mature self-governance and mutual respect as a requisite for any activity, including raising cattle and crops.
After a few hours of dragging hoses these dry spring days, the cool, breezy late afternoons are perfect for lingering outside with a refreshing beverage and some of the books we perused only lightly and under duress in school.
Poetry was culturally significant in all social and economic classes in England, Europe, Canada, and the U.S.A. until after the First World War, whose death and desolation led to a cultural collapse that remains with us (https://www.history.com/news/how-world-war-i-changed-literature). The works of John Milton, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley (unhappy name), William Wordsworth, John Keats, Rudyard Kipling and thousands of published, unpublished, and parlour-poets celebrated all the challenges, sorrows, and victories of life. Every newspaper once published poetry, and all school functions featured original student work. If it was often clunky and derivative, well, practice is how we make good work in the end.
My uncle, Bob Holmes of happy memory, a farmer and dairyman, over coffee recited from memory John Milton’s “On His Blindness.” I’m not sure he finished high school, but he remembered this favorite from his boyhood.
Despite the post-war infestation of free verse (which is not verse at all), such poets as Robert Frost, James Weldon Johnson (“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” George McKay Brown, Randall Jarrell, Langston Hughes, Wendell Berry, Claude McKay (his “If We Must Die” was quoted by Churchill in defiance of the Nazis), and so many others, in spite of fashionable despair continued to write poetry that addressed and celebrated the human condition meaningfully and skillfully.
In 1945 Field Marshal Wavell (https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/wavell), who in 1915 lost an eye (but never his true vision) at Ypres, published an anthology of poems that had been important to him in his military career. Despite its unfortunate title, Other Men’s Flowers (a quote from Montaigne), this little book demonstrates the strength and skill and muscularity of real poetry as opposed to the weak, self-pitying, I-I-I-Me-Me-Poor-Me free verse drivel now occupying shelf-space that could be used for something more substantial – Mickey Mouse funny books come to mind.
Those who teach at home (there are no such constructs, either as nouns or verbs, as “home school” or, worse, “homeschool”) or who work within more formal school situations, could hardly do better than to introduce a boy or girl to Wavell’s anthology from perhaps the fifth grade.
Poetry, like farming and the family, is part of the fertile soil of civilization, not an accessory.
Besides, the bees and hummingbirds will enjoy hearing you read to them.
That’s the latest buzz, anyway.
-30-
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