Yellow Chair - MePhone photograph

A Funeral Home Visitation - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

A Funeral Home Visitation

Conversations with people we don’t remember
With people whose names we don’t remember
About long-ago events we don’t remember
Concluding with, “He’s in a better place”

And in that better place he will not need
To try to match faces with memories
Or sign the book with all the family names
As scratchings with the funeral home’s cheap pen

Conversations with people we don’t remember:
A metaphor for our own lives unlived

Stupid Mask Stupid Stupid Mask - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Stupid Mask Stupid Stupid Mask

The stupid mask I wore the stupid mask
To Mass this morning stupid mask it stank
Of chemicals stupid mask and fogged my glasses
I felt stupid wearing that stupid mask

          (You look stupid anyway, old man)

The stupid mask I didn’t like the way
It muffled everything, that stupid mask
And with my foggy glasses stupid mask
I felt detached from Word and Eucharist

          (Don’t blame the mask for your lack of focus)

But the mask, after all, is not about me:
It’s about the frail and sickly, you see

           (Who’s a good boy, then!)

All Those Silences are Wrong - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

All Those Silences are Wrong

There are those who never listen to us
And there are those who snoop into our souls
And we hear not the sufferings of others
And we delight in hearing of their pain

Everybody, switch categories now

Where the Altar is Not - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Where the Altar is Not

In a Time of Locked Churches

Where the Altar is not, it still must be
Beneath the sacred dust of Walsingham

Where the Altar is not, it still must be
Heart-hidden, even if we have forgotten

Where the Altar is not, it still must be
In a mother’s prayers for her errant sons

Where the Altar is not, it still must be
Somewhere in the ruins of a holy house

Where the Altar is not, it still must be
In the sunlit chapels of English verse

Where the Altar is not, it still must be
In Our Lady’s loving care - and so are we

The Summer of We're Against Everything - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

The Summer of We're Against Everything

Some Americans costumed in Ninja suits
And others schlubbing under red plastic caps
Shoot, loot, stab, grab, scream, steam, pass gas, and grasp
Our herd immunity against compassion

Revolution selfied and Instagrammed
Presented through Facebook, nourished with Starbuck’s
Seasoned with tear gas, well-stirred with clubs and shields
Spray-painting Joan of Arc with “Tear it Down!” 1

But of all the things we’re against, dear brother
We seem to be mostly against
                                                                  each other


1 This was in fact a 2017 event: https://aleteia.org/2017/08/17/joan-of-arc-caught-up-in-statue-toppling-movement/

Decolonize Your Bookshelf? - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Decolonize Your Bookshelf? No.

“It's noticed, you know. Oh, yes, your attitude’s been noticed!”

-Soviet Deputy to Yuri in Doctor Zhivago

There is a fashion – and as fashions come, they go – of decolonizing one’s bookshelf. The idea is that the reader should self-interrogate his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) cultural influences and determine if they are not right, not approved, not liked. Or, as Pasternak’s officious, oppressive, busy-body Soviet Deputy says, noticed.

The reality is that readers do not colonize their books in the first place, as if one’s library were occupied by Colonel Blimp and Dr. Watson’s 5th Northumberland Fusiliers. The books you and I choose for instruction, for enlightenment, and for delight are not self-referential echo chambers.

Within reach of this made-in-China computer y’r ‘umble scrivener can access, among other books:

The Way, by Josemaria Escriva (Spanish)
Mao Tse-Dung’s Little Red Book (Chinese)
Saint Benedict’s Rule (Roman)
The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy (Irish)
Book of Longing, Leonard Cohen (Canadian)
The Penguin History of Canada (Canadian, eh)
Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl (Austrian)
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, Helen Simonson (English, but a woman, so there)
The 1940 edition of Q’s The Oxford Book of English Verse (well, yes, English)
Collected Poems, Joseph Brodsky (Polish)

On the wall behind me are some rascally Russians: Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn, Ahkmatova, Turgenev, Pushkin (not a very nice man), Tolstoy, Tsvetaeva (I can’t spell her name), Vasily Grossman, Gogol, Gorky, Yevtushenko, Dostoyevsky, Dostoyevsky, and more Dostoyevsky.

Is that diverse enough for our increasingly nosy and judgmental domestic comrades and comradettes, both Blue and Red?

Today I began Doug Swanson’s Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers. When I have finished I will shelve it next to Carrie Gibson’s El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America.

Under the protections of the Constitution I am free to do so.

Next on my reading cycle is an anthology of poems by Elizabeth Bishop, who played for the other team, so for one set of Ms. Grundys shouldn't she balance two beastly white males?

Auden was also on the other team, so he's okay, and Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons) was a Communist, so he's okay too, but not to the other set of Ms. Grundys. Tolkien, Lewis, Churchill, Remarque, Byron, Shelley, Keats – probably “noticed.”

As an American who finds all the constitutional amendments to be right, just, lawful, and ‘way cool, including the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 6th, I advise all the Ms. Grundys to follow the Constitution and mind their own da®ned business about what books people read and what movies people watch. Censorship is un-American (and the president, too, should be mindful of that).

https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-erosion-of-deep-literacy

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/06/870910728/your-bookshelf-may-be-part-of-the-problem

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-men-dont-read-how-pub_b_549491

https://www.rbth.com/arts/2014/10/21/film_censorship_in_the_soviet_union_39163

https://www.publicdiplomacycouncil.org/2020/05/18/china-censorship-and-book-translations/

-30-

"Tear down eye soar" (sic) in Stoplight, Texas - MePhone photograph

Theology in the Head - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Theology in the Head

They aren’t the Jordan, the waters of the head
Unless maybe they are
Flowing not across the forehead
But across the tiles

Pursued less by a hound of Heaven
Than by a soul-scrubbing brush
At 0200 when we’re made to field-day the head
Not the forehead but the head

Where 60 recruits have washed and shaved
Brushed their healthy young teeth
Showered and (alliterate the “sh” in “showered”)
In haste, liturgically, upon command

And we in our skivvies speak of God
The meaning of life
The Lenten humility in scrubbing toilet bowls
And whether chief petty officers can be saved

A Question I Must Ask of Myself - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

A Question I Must Ask of Myself

The question is asked: What good shall I do today?
It is a fair question. I don’t know who asked it first
But this morning the only importance
Is that I ask this question of myself

Some of the tricky things about freedom:
There are no bugles blasting reveille
Alarm clocks softly mind their ticks and tocks
The radio news is irrelevant

And so I need report only to God
With a question I must ask of myself

CAUTION Yellow CAUTION Tape CAUTION at CAUTION the CAUTION Last CAUTION Supper CAUTION - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

CAUTION Yellow CAUTION Tape CAUTION at CAUTION

the CAUTION Last CAUTION Supper CAUTION

Trinity Sunday – a cosmic leap indeed
From the second week in Lent until now
We bless ourselves with holy chemicals
And the awkward elbow-bump of peace

25% capacity in the Upper Room
Between each disciple an empty chair
And yellow CAUTION tape here and there
As Jesus lifts His mask to speak the Eucharist

But after three months, how wonderful
To be invited to the Table again

"I'm not a Robot" - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

“I’m not a Robot”

Sometimes we are asked to tick a little box
Each of us averring that he is not
A robot, and thus passed through the coded locks
Thankful for the access that we have got

Presumably a thoughtful robot, though
Would not be deferred by a little checkmark
It could easily tap the box just so
And liberate itself from ignorance dark

Sometimes we are asked to tick a little box -
I still feel as dumb as a bocks of rox

"...the new Blogger interface..." - a grumble

"In late June, the new Blogger interface will become the default for all users. The legacy interface will still be optionally available. We recommend trying the new interface by clicking “Try the New Blogger” in the left-hand navigation. Please file any critical issues encountered. Read more. "

Oh, great, someone is changing things, probably just for the sake of changing things, not for any valid reason. I will try to keep up.

And just what is "the left-hand navigation?" And on the left hand of what?

Queen Jadis' Deplorable Word - not really a poem...

...because one word cannot constitute a poem, but do enjoy the moment. Neologisms are usually both useful and fun, but some are not worthy of humanity.


Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Queen Jadis’ Deplorable Word

"That was the secret of secrets. It had long been known to the great kings of our race that there was a word which, if spoken with the proper ceremonies, would destroy all living things except the one who spoke it."

―Jadis in C.S. Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew

Webinar

Inspecting my Bunker - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Inspecting my Bunker

I have been inspecting my bunker today:
Sunflowers are at their posts, saluting the sun
Bright butterflies pat down the marigolds
And deem them safe for a pass-in-review

Zinnias in happy colors riot along the fence
A perimeter keeping the puppies safe inside
(But an easy path for a ‘possum gourmet
Each night on his tasty tomato raids)

No concrete here, no iron, no clanging doors
No darkness – for this
                                       is a celebration of Light

"It's Only a Flesh Wound" - rhyming doggerel

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

“It’s Only a Flesh Wound”

Gunsmoke Re-runs

Three times each morning that man in black
Swaggers High Noon-ish towards Marshal Dillon
The poor wretch shoots; Marshal Dillon shoots back
Three times each morning – so there ain’t no killin’

Robert Frost: "I Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World" - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

“I Had a Lover’s Quarrel with the World”

Here along Beer Can Road and County Dump Extension y’r ‘umble scrivener has set himself to reading all of Robert Frost in a third-hand Library of America edition.

In school we all studied “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road not Taken,” “Fire and Ice,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and other of Mr. Frost’s more familiar pieces, and they stay with us. They stay with us because they are good, both in form and in content.

Mr. Frost crafts smooth, flowing iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter, usually rhyming but often not. That he makes rhyme work so well demonstrates the excellence of his art; there are only five – arguably six – vowel sounds in English, which rhymed through the pen or keyboard of a learner usually ends in clunkiness or unintended comedy.

Most modern poetry is free verse, which is not poetry at all but only prose lazily sorted out into artless broken lines. As Stephen Fry says in his foreword to The Ode Less Travelled, free verse is like a child who knows nothing about music simply beating on piano keys and calling it music.

As for content, Mr. Frost writes about everything except himself, thus sharing Creation with us. Most modern poetry is a closed loop of endless, self-pitying, self-referential loop, I, I, I, my, my, my me, me, me, poor me, nobody understands me.”

“But it’s from the heart” is no excuse for this sort of thing in any art.

One of my, my, my (appreciate the irony) recent discoveries is Mr. Frost’s “The Lesson for Today,” a speech given before Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society in the summer of 1941. Mr. Frost gave his address in blank verse with the occasional end rhyme. That his presentation was in verse was not only appropriate for a professional poet but which could be, and often was, accomplished with some skill by the ordinary high school graduate whose curriculum was predicated upon civilization.

And then came Sputnik.

“The Lesson for Today” is a meditation on mortality, eternity, and purpose. Mr. Frost’s daughter died in 1934, his wife died in 1938, his son died in 1940. The Second World War had been going on in China since 1933 and in Europe since 1939. In “The Lesson for Today” Mr. Frost sometimes has a little fun, but the arc connects all these sorrows without directly mentioning them.

The speaker of the poem, perhaps Mr. Frost himself, has a dialogue with Alcuin of York, the Master of Charlemagne’s palace school, in order to “Seek converse common cause and brotherhood” in exploring life during personal and cultural crises. The poet, best known for his rustic works, considers the minor goddess Dione (within the context of a line of iambic pentameter, pronounced as die-ON-ney), the Emperor Charlemagne, Alcuin of York and his concept of the Memento Mori, God, the Paladins (the 12 champions of Christendom), Roland, Olivier, the Battle of Roncesvalles, and the brevity of life:

There is a limit to our time extension.
We are all doomed to broken off careers,
And so’s the nation, so’s the total race.
The earth itself is liable to the fate
Of meaninglessly being broken off.

In conclusion, the speaker – or Mr. Frost – says to Alcuin:

I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

In one of his last speeches, President Kennedy, who survived Mr. Frost by less than a year, said at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library,

“In [a] free society art is not a weapon, and it does not belong to the spheres of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself…”  (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-purpose-of-poetry/309470/).

And truth sometimes leads to a lover’s quarrel with the world.

-30-

Note: I have no connection with the Library of America. If I did, I'd recommend you buy their excellent volumes new, but since I don't, I recommend that you find them used via the InterGossip, garage sales, and, I regret to say, library sales. The sharp-eyed reader will note that I covered the name of a public library in order to save some assistant librarian embarrassment for selling for a dollar or so a cultural treasure, and some other assistant librarian's ignorance in labelling (via computer code, for he or she obeyed the mindless chant of LEARN. TO. CODE.) the book as a reference work instead of as an anthology of poetry.

A Blurry MePhone High School Graduation via MyFaceSpaceBookeo - poem (of a sort)

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

A Blurry MePhone High School Graduation via MyFaceSpaceBookeo

Prayer mumble WOOOO! Mumble pledge mumble WOOWOO! we WOO! are mumble TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED WOOOOOOOOOOOO! Mumble here mumble WOOHOO! tonight STATIC [COWBELL] to WOOOO! honor WOO! the [AIRHORN] mumble of 2020. WOOOOOOOOOOOO! This TRANMISSION INTERRUPTED mumble isn’t [COWBELL SOLO] mumble mumble WOO! the ceremony [AIRHORN] we were all mumbling forward to ten mumble months ago WOOOOOOOOOOOO! valedictorian WOOWOOOOO! Salutatorian TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED YOU GO GIRL! WOOOOOO! We’ll always remember mumble TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED as I mumble call your names STATIC [COWBELL SOLO] benediction WHOHOOOOO! Jesus [AIRHORN] class mumble song [AIRHORN] WOOWOO! WOO! WOOOOOOOOOOOO! WOOHOO! WHOHOOOOO! [COWBELL] [AIRHORN] mumble school song mumble WOOWOO! WOO! WOOOOOOOOOOOO! WOOHOO! WOOWOOOOO!

Locked and Loaded in a Max Mara Tote - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot

Locked and Loaded in a Max Mara Tote

They say it began with a counterfeit bill
Printed by someone who knew how to code
And passed around until it was exchanged
Printed material for a human life

The Good is not much in demand these days
Nor yet the Beautiful, nor yet the True
A Bible locked and loaded in a Max Mara™ tote
Accessorizing a Potemkin street

They say it began with a counterfeit bill
But what among us isn’t counterfeit now?

The Governor Declares us to be a Disaster Area - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

The Governor Declares us to be a Disaster Area

The appropriately backlit headline read:

Texas Gov Declares State 'Disaster Area' Over Protests

I clicked the tab, and the next page read:

An unexpected error has occurred.

Which seemed right enough, so I left it at that