Sunflower and Moon, Dusk, 27 June 2020 - MePhone Photograph

Ships of Theseus - poem

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

Ships of Theseus

Every seven years, some say, we are renewed
In coded sequences not understood
Animal cells, well-timed, within us die
They leave forever, replaced and not refreshed

But even so, our selves are still our selves
And condemnations from the past endure
And praises, too, all of them a little worn
And the remember whens are an ever now

Then what...?

The eternal Wind

The eternal Wind that was before we are
Is the Forever following our little ships

"Let There be Sung 'Non Nobis' and 'Te Deum'" - poem

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

“Let There be Sung ‘Non nobis’ and ‘Te Deum’”

-Henry V

Vultures circle high in the airy blue
At a distance elegant in their sweeps
Far from the planet surface and its sorrows
As if they are searching for eternal truth

In truth they are searching for something dead
A putrid corpse to rip with their foul beaks
A life interrupted, breath stopped by death
A pig, a cow, a snake, a me, a you

That dark and croaking thing of rot and slime:
A vulture is but a messenger of time

A Woke Editing of Brother Robert Frost - weekly column

(Transferring this drivel to the InterGossip made a mess of the formatting, but it was pretty much a mess before it got here.)


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

A Woke Editing of Brother Robert Frost

Several statues of Robert Frost grace our land, none of which has yet been mistaken for a Confederate general, but hey, that’s coming.

In anticipation of sculptures of one of our greatest poets being supplanted by animatronic images of, oh, Lenin or Stalin or Miley Cyrus’ get-thee-hence twerking for the cause of understanding that the coronavirus was here first, we must re-write Robert Frost for the sensitivities of the year of the common era 2020. Herein follows a Robert Frost poem beaten into submission and correct thought.

And, hey, DEFUND IAMBIC TETRAMETER!

Stopping Without Permission

by The People’s Scientific Forest on a Global Warming Evening

Whose Collective Scientific Forest this is we think we know
Their Kolkhoz is in The People’s Village, though
They will not see us slacking off our assigned labors unsupervised
To watch The People’s Collective Scientific Forest fill up with global warming

Our collective’s little horse must think it somewhat un-soviet
To stop without The People’s Assigned Living Spaces near
Between The People’s Collective Scientific Forest and global warming lake
The least comradely evening of the second year of our latest five-year-plan

He / She / They gives his / her / their Red Star harness bells a shake
To accuse us of some un-comradely lapse in focusing on our delegated purpose
The only other sound’s the Woodcutters’ Collective Choir, singing our new
          international anthem, Comrade Lennon’s “Imagine,”
And global warming wind and Twitter directives

The Collective Scientific Forest is utilitarian and properly gridded, and serves
          The Working People
But we have our comradely oaths and work assignments to keep
And kilometers to go before we take our assigned rest in our assigned bunks
And kilometers to go before we take our assigned rest in our assigned bunks

-30-

Dentistry Again - poem with lots of self-pity

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

Dentistry Again

Anaesthesia slowly passing from me
Dragging the pain of yesterday along
The muffled echoings of imaginings
Colliding with synapses in the dark

Thinking little beyond a coffee cup
And less upon the pages of a book
With thoughts all scrambled the pages back
And through vague eyes into my foggy brain

How difficult to force even a clumsy rhyme
This ordinary Tuesday in ordinary time

Bees Disapprove of Us - poem

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

Bees Disapprove of Us

There’s nothing the bees care to learn from us
We talk to them anyway in our idleness
Having put away the hose or the rake
We’re in the mood to gab for a little while

But Calvinist bees fly impatiently by
From flower to water to office-hive
To check their quotas and hum their reports
Then speed back to their favorite flowered fields

They disapprove of us indolent men
And so rebuke us for our slothy sin

A Viking Funeral for a Fisherman - Frivolous Doggerel

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

A Viking Funeral for a Fisherman

When I die:

Just place my body in my old bass boat
With a cooler of beer at my sneakered feet
And anchor me with an old fishing float
Secured with a bowline to the forward cleat

In my left hand place my best Shakespeare reel
And in my right a stinky old cigar
Saint Peter’s Fish in my dad’s wicker creel
Then point the boat’s prow to the brightest star

It’s now the fishes’ turn; I’ll be their food
Powered off to Glory by an Evinrude

The Theory and Practice of Summer - poem

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

The Theory and Practice of Summer

June is Dairy Month

Summer is better in theory than in practice:
Watermelon days barefootin’ in the shade
Pole-fishing for perch in the neighbor’s pond
Oak-tree afternoons lost in a library book

Oh, no

Up before dawn to get the milk cows in
Fence-building blisters in the prickly heat
Pulling the weeds in Mama’s garden plot
And hauling to the barn late August hay

Oh, yes

Summer’s not what it could be, as a rule
But still it’s good because there ain’t no school!

The More Up to Date a Book is... MePhone Photograph

The more "up to date" a book is, the sooner it will be dated.

-C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

Negative Capability - poem

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

Negative Capability in a Basket

 

Negative capability is not
A basket that bore hens’ eggs yesterday
And will carry tomatoes tomorrow
Is not empty today

 

An empty basket is a positive space
Which is laden with possibilities
A book, a dream a hope, a picnic lunch
And thus quite full today

 

There is no emptiness within its rands
Slews
Wales
Stakes
Bye-stakes
Upsetts
Fitches
For we will fill our baskets with good things

From John Wayne to Spike Lee - poem

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

From John Wayne to Spike Lee

From John Wayne to Spike Lee, we who were there
Are set upon gaming boards or movie screens
For the artistic outrage of award winners
Choosing their costumes for the Oscars show

Arms makers, double-entry contractors
Artists, writers, cinema studios
Everybody seems to have profited
From the war where they sent us to disappear

But we are left dying for appointments
with the VA
                          who might finish the job

A Repudiation of the Soulless Metric System - rhyming doggerel

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

A Repudiation of the Soulless Metric System

Medicine is injected by the litre
But beer is enjoyed by the happy pint
Forced marches are by the kilometre
But ambling by the mile I fall behint

Napoleon invented the millimetre
The deci, the centi, and alas, poor milli
And used them to measure his poor (self)
As Josephine said (but she was silly)

Oh, let us keep the quart, the pound, the mile
Always elegant, thus always in style

A Brief Review of CULT OF GLORY: THE BOLD AND BRUTAL HISTORY OF THE TEXAS RANGERS

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

A Brief Review of

Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers

“…the sense of history hangs like heavy smoke.”

-Swanson, p. 396

NB: Cult of Glory was recommended to me by a Texas Ranger, a long-time friend and an honorable man, who was interviewed for this book.

Mr. Swanson began writing this book several years ago and it was published early this year; it is not a fashionable pile-on of law enforcement.


If today you find yourself in the company of Texas Rangers, no matter who you are, you know that truth and justice will prevail.

But it was not always so, and that is the thesis of Doug J. Swanson’s disturbing but well-documented book, Cult of Glory: The Bold and Brutal History of the Texas Rangers (New York: Viking, 2020). In a time when the concept of research is a casual “You could look it up,” which means uncritically accepting the first search response that shimmers before one’s eyes on the InterGossip, Mr. Swanson labored for years through physical files of crumbling reports, numerous unpublished first-person narratives, newspaper files, audio files, newsreels, news reports, and personal interviews.

The bibliography runs to seven pages in tiny print, with a professional mix of primary and second sources, including some fifteen books published in the 19th century, dozens more published in the 20th and 21st, scholarly works of collected interviews and narratives, and a flavoring of popular works, including movies.

However, despite the consistent excellence of research, conclusions, and presentation, an inexplicable error obtains, the populist concept that DPS troopers do little but write traffic tickets. The DPS are our state police, and they enforce the people’s laws in a variety of services and programs (https://www.dps.texas.gov/). That most of us encounter DPS troopers only through the occasional “Sir, you were doing 75 in a 65 zone…” moment is to fail to understand their many missions.

I am advised that the first two women Rangers (p. 398) were not in “clerical positions” in the DPS. They were both sergeants specializing in criminal law enforcement. One had earned a master’s degree before promotion and is now a PhD.

Beyond the metaphorical and sometimes literal legwork, the next challenge in writing history is sorting out the veracity of sources. No one has ever chosen to tell the complete truth about himself (the pronoun is gender-neutral) in an autobiography, which includes letters and interviews. There is also the reality of perception: if ten people witness an accident or a crime, none of them, even if all are determined to be objective, will agree on exactly what happened.

As St. Thomas More is said to have said, “I have no window with which to look into another man’s soul.” Given that caveat, it appears that Mr. Swanson has worked out his research far better than most writers, and has written an accessible, fascinating, and honest book which we should read neither defensively in protection of one of our cultural myths nor judgmentally in smug triumphalism for propaganda purposes, but in humility.

Everyone whose education and thoughtful personal reading consists of more than chanting “Learn. To. Code.” is aware of the reality that history is violent and that borders are where nationalities and cultures meet and fight. Such conflicts, after all, are much of the Old Testament. The Scotch and English borderers were as mindlessly bloody as any of the armies, outlaws, guerrillas, and, yes, Rangers along the Rio Grande. European wars have almost always been predicated on who owned what useless bog, and, as for that line from Stettin to Trieste that Churchill noted 80 years ago, it’s still a mess. We also have Russia and Finland, China and Taiwan, China and Viet-Nam, China and India, Poland and the Czech Republic, Serbia and Croatia and Bosnia in a three-way hissy-fit, the continued occupation of Constantinople by Turks, and on and on.

Even the purportedly friendliest border in the world is a two-hundred year narrative of fighting: Americans have invaded Canada at least seven times (https://www.history.com/news/7-times-the-u-s-canada-border-wasnt-so-peaceful), and the British who burned our capital in 1814 were Canadian colonial troops. Admittedly this was in reprisal for Americans burning York (now Toronto).

Maybe we could work it out over a cuppa at a Tim Horton’s, eh.

No culture, then, can in good conscience be prissy about border wars. But the reader must be warned that the Rangers’ rough riding in our border wars makes for rough reading now.

The narrative becomes even more painful after the Civil War and well into the 20th century, when some of the various manifestations of the Rangers (there was no consistent organization until 1957) often deteriorated into genocide, banditry, land theft, official oppression, murder, false testimony, and hired thuggery even while fighting others who were also practicing genocide (the Comanches were not merry young fellows out for a lark). Swanson argues that some of the Rangers’ enormities not only prolonged wars and hostility but sometimes generated them through unwarranted attacks on mostly (not always) peaceful groups such as the Apache and the exiled Kickapoo. Further, the Mexican population along the border seems to have had little connection with or trust in either Mexico City or Austin, preferring to be left alone, and were pushed into resistance through the violence of Ranger bands acting out the Anglo-ascendancy arrogance of the times. In East Texas, prosperous, patriotic, and industrious African-American communities and towns were subjected by pogroms by resentful whites, and the Rangers of that era were complicit in their failure to defend their fellow Texans.

Texas history is not a John Wayne movie, with the goodies and the baddies neatly sorted out.

One of the more interesting parts (with fewer corpses) in the book about recent history is the Lyndon Johnson-Josefa Johnson-John Douglas Kinser-Mac Wallace-Henry Marshall-Hattie Valdez-Billy Sol Estes-FBI-Texas Rangers continuum in Chapter 20, complete with a county judge ruling that Henry Marshall committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest five times with a bolt-action rifle.

And let us not forget the absurdity of our throw-grandmama-from the-train lieutenant-governor, Dan Patrick nee’ Dannie Scott Goeb, in demanding that the Rangers solve a locker-room theft. In the event the theft was solved by Mexican police because, in that fine old Texas tradition, the miscreant fled across the Rio Grande / Rio Bravo to Mexico. But we can be sure that the Rangers were happy to be pulled from such frivolous matters as murders and drug cartels in order to serve in the cause of a man separated from one of his shirts.

Mr. Swanson has done us and the Texas Rangers great service, and he has helped greatly not only in our understanding of Texas history but in our understanding of the histories of nations and peoples in conflict.

For our immediate purposes, it is good to know that if today you find yourself in the company of Texas Rangers, no matter who you are, you know that truth and justice will prevail.

-30-

Romance of the Barren Plinth - poem

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

Romance of the Barren Plinth

They’ve gone and pulled a general down
And all the birds that used to rest
Upon his visage fallen to ground
Will have to seek another nest

Four plinths are placed in Trafalgar Square
Albion’s lions repose on three
The fourth is open to the English air
(They probably aren’t saving it for me)

But you might rest on a plinth one day
(Of course you won’t be allowed to stay)

A South Dakota Sunflower in Texas - MePhone Photograph

This is from a packet of seeds I bought at Wall Drug, Wall, South Dakota years ago. The germination rate was low because of age (I had misplaced the packet), but the ones that grew seem very happy in the Texas sun.

Wall Drug, South Dakota - doggerel

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

Wall Drug, South Dakota

The 80-foor dinosaur is really nice
For the children of summer to Ahhh! and Oooh!
John Wayne pictures, cap pistols, and gamblers’ dice
Sugary candies and taffy to chew

And I bought gifts that will last ‘til the fall
They even delight the merry old sun
Happy prairie delights that bless us all
Then for the winter squirrels a feast of fun

At Wall Drug –

All sorts of gifts and books and wants and needs
But I came away with sunflower seeds!


(I have no connection with Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota; it’s just that the place is several acres of interesting shops and outlets and good, kitschy fun.)

http://www.walldrug.com/

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