Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Cliché is to Say That We Didn’t See It Coming
A
happy child, cuddling one of her pets -
That’s
the picture they used for her obituary
We
didn’t see it coming
Thursday, November 12, 2020
The Cliche' is to Say That We Didn't See It Coming - poem
Tuesday, November 10, 2020
for Remembrance Day / Veterans' Day - poem
Something About Life
“Live. Just live.”
-Yuri
in Doctor Zhivago
The plane lifted, and the cheering was wild
And then pretty quickly the pilot said
“We are now clear of Vietnamese
Territorial waters.”
There was joy,
Even wilder cheering for most, and quiet
Joy for a few. For
me, Karamazov
To hand, peace, and infinite gratitude.
“I’m alive,” I said to myself and to God,
“Alive. I will live, after all.” To read, to write,
Simply to live.
Not for revolution,
Whose smoke poisons the air, not for the war,
Not to withdraw into that crippling self-pity
Which is the most evil lotus of all,
But to live. To
read, to write.
But death comes,
Then up the Vam Co Tay, or now in bed,
Or bleeding in a frozen February ditch;
Death comes, scorning our frail, feeble, failing flesh,
But silent then at the edge of the grave,
For all graves will be empty, not in the end,
But in the very beginning of all.
A Catechism of Brokenness - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
A Catechism of Brokenness
The celebrant breaks the Body in two
The
Body is broken
The
celebrant is broken
The
communicant is broken
Only
the Word is whole: “This is My Body…”
The
celebrant breaks the Body in two
That
it may be shared
Broken
again
And
shared further along
Only
the Word is whole: “This is My Body…”
The
Celebrant breaks the Body in two
That
in the sequenced brokenness
In
all the little broken Pieces
One-ness
may come
Monday, November 9, 2020
The Geometry of Intersectionality - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Geometry of Intersectionality
1.
Crossroads
Intersections
aren’t crossroads, you know
Where
you can choose to stop a while and talk
With
a man walking some other way in life
And
learn something over a borrowed cigarette
2.
Intersections
At
intersections you never meet anyone
It’s
all about obedience to lights and signs
And
painted arrows in the road that seem
To
point everywhere except where you want to go
3.
Stop-for-awhile signs
There
are stop signs in life. You have to stop
But
then you go – a stop sign isn’t forever
Sunday, November 8, 2020
What Went Ye into the Casino to See? - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
What Went Ye into the Casino to See?
Shootings at a Las Vegas Casino
-news item
What
went ye into the casino to see -
A
numbered mandala spinning truth on red
A
James Bond manque in a cartoon tee
A
tatted Sylvia Trench wheezing a joint?
What
went ye into the casino to see -
A
clapped-out Toyota cruising the drag
Mysterious
encounters behind the Denny’s
Getting
lucky in the Lucky 7 Motel?
Does
a man learn at last what life really means
Choking
in blood among the slot machines?
Cf. St. Matthew 11:7
Saturday, November 7, 2020
Theology of the Garden Bench - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Theology of the Garden Bench
God’s
good, green earth is holy, and must be reverenced
As
an act of His Creation, a work of His hands
And
of His breath, His singing into being
This
glorious epiphany in which we live
Our
little children live close upon the earth
Laughing
and tumbling through the summer grass
With
kittens and puppies as their happy playmates
Sweet
Eden’s innocence echoed in them all
And
we with our weary, creaky old bones
Repose
like royalty on an old wooden bench
And
give thanks
Friday, November 6, 2020
Daddy, What Were You Doing When the World Changed Forever? - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
What Were You Doing When the World Changed
Forever?
The
world will change today – that is a cinch
Newspaper
drama by the column inch
The
vote count is over; we’ve come to the clinch
And
I, in peace – I built a garden bench
Thursday, November 5, 2020
Guy Fawkes Day - an App Payment for the Guy?
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Guy Fawkes Day - an App Payment for the Guy?
Remember,
remember a good fifth of plonk
Elections,
tantrums, and plot
I
see no reason
This
autumn season
Why
this year should not be forgot!
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Someone Said There's an Election Going Around - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Someone Said There’s
an Election Going Around
In
much work there shall be abundance: but where there are many words, there is
oftentimes want.
-Proverbs 14:23
This
autumn morning I have a fence to mend
Fence.
As in fence. Concrete footings, wooden planks
The
rotten bits to be cut out and replaced
No
metaphors will be harmed in this repair
Later
I will harvest the last of the sunflowers
Drooping
now in the fullness of life’s end
No
longer following the sun, only the earth
Soon
to be seeds for the winter squirrels and birds
Someone
said there’s an election going around
Fine,
fine, but the grapevines need pruning down
The Whole World is Laughing - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Whole World is
Laughing
Two vulgar men grappling over nuclear codes
Flinging schoolyard abuse about like poo
We still don’t know who won the election
We only know who lost
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
The Staff Cafeteria at the Lubyanka - poem
Lawrence
Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Staff Cafeteria at the Lubyanka
Spaghetti
again?
A
busy day in the cellar. Admin
Wants
more cells cleared for Lenin’s birthday bash
They
come along okay until we pass the offices
And
then they know. Some of them cry. It’s rough
Put
it on my tab
It’s
pretty rough upstairs, too, meeting your quota
Of
counter-revolutionaries and recidivists
You
just drag them downstairs and then shoot them
Easy-peasey
for you, but the paperwork…!
Two
cups of tea
Shop-talk
and gossip, who got a promotion
Budgets
and schedules, and comradely devotion
Monday, November 2, 2020
All Intelligence is Artificial - poem
Lawrence
Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
All Intelligence is Artificial
No,
no, we are not banks of blinking lights
And
random teletype-type taps and beeps
Like
Patrick McGoohan’s educational General
Or
George Jetson’s mainframe at Spacely Sprockets
And
we are not new Robby-the-Robots
Nor
one with The Borg, with electric eyes
Scanning
decaying humans for their flaws
Devouring
a pancreas and a battery for lunch
We
are within and through God’s intelligence -
The
artificial part is that we must work it
Sunday, November 1, 2020
"You in the West Have No Idea..." - poem
Lawrence
Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
“You in the West Have No Idea…”
You in the West have no idea what
it’s like to be ruled by peasants.
-Mihai in Robert D. Kaplan’s Balkan
Ghosts, p. 138
Oh,
yes
We
do
Saturday, October 31, 2020
The Ministry of Clockery - Moonbeam Saving Time
Lawrence
Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Ministry of Clockery
Moonbeam Saving Time
Change for the sake of change –
spare change? Spare change?
There must be a Ministry of
Clockery
With Cratchit-y clerks drawing
clocks at their desks
Supervised by a Scrooge of
Clockery
They scriven at their screens and so
change things
Chanting “Change is good” and “Progress
is change”
“The more things change, all the
more change for us”
And if nothing needs changing, yes
it does
And once in a while at the Coke
machine
One of the Cratchit-y clerks
laughs, “Spare change?”
Friday, October 30, 2020
+Father Raphael Barousse, OSB
This is a poem I wrote for Fr. Raph’s 90th
birthday this spring. Last night - 29 October 2020 - he died truly in the fullness of years, in the
prayerful company of his brothers at the Abbey, and so I re-send this as my
poor valedictory for him on his happiest birthday of all:
Father Raphael Barousse, OSB
Abbey St. Joseph, Covington, Louisiana
Monk, Missionary, Muleskinner,
Writer, Teacher,
Scholar, Raconteur, Uncle Bubby,
Friend
To God, Who Gives Joy to Our Youth
For Reverend Raphael Barousse, OSB
Father Raph - Uncle Bubby - on His Birthday
Introibo ad altare Dei
Ad Deum qui laetificat juvenitutem meam
You look into the mirror and ask yourself
“Who is that old man staring back at me?”
Your friends tell you you’re lookin’ good -
for your age
And your uncooperative body in protest
creaks
But you and all of them are wrong because
You still approach the Altar as a child
As you once were, and are, and will be
forever
For God will have it so, will have you
so -
Enchanted by His magic - a little boy
A little boy in Sunday shoes and shirt
Who hears his Mama whispering to him, “Don’t
squirm!”
As the Mass hums through a summer morning
Until that moment when you encounter Him:
The universe spirals through its sunlit dance
Creation spins around, in, and down
Eternity circles the paten and cup
Miraculum
Eternity circles the paten and cup
Around and out and up, Creation spins
Through its sunlit dance the universe spirals
And only little children understand that
And only little children are invited
And so God gives joy to your forever-youth
And your forever-youth gives joy to God
On the Opening of Magic Words (and all words are magic) - poem
Lawrence
Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
On the Opening of Words
I
love to open words, and so do you:
Old
words growled by our fathers in the fens
Smooth
words polished on the tables of the Law
Neologisms
laughed into being over beer
Words
cadenced on the bloody fields of Mars
Words
whispered on the perfumed pillows of Venus
Words
prayed around the Altar of our God
Words
breathed in pain on the last day of all
I
love to open words, and so do you
Our
words, our holy words, both old and new
Thursday, October 29, 2020
A Saturday Morning in the Bookstore - weekly column
Lawrence Hall
A Saturday Morning in the Bookstore
This is re-cycled from 2011, when a pleasant
hour or two in the bookstore did not involve appointments, masks, anti-social
distancing, and anti-socials sitting at the three remaining coffee tables for
hours while on their computers:
Why are there now so many books of lists of
ten things we must do before we die? Why
not nine, or eleven? And why should pay someone for a list of experiences he
says you and I must fulfill before we shuffle off what Shakespeare is pleased
to call this mortal coil? Will my life
be meaningless if I don’t jump out of an airplane over Scotland, see a famous
statue in a Buddhist temple in Bangladesh, eat fried snake in Singapore, bicycle
through Kenya, visit some snaky island off Honduras, or flush a certain Czarist
toilet in St. Petersburg?
The history magazines are mostly about
war. One magazine I perused featured a
photograph of a Nazi general about to be executed in Italy in December of
1945. He looks distressed. Perhaps his “Top Ten Things to Do Before I
Die” list was incomplete: “#9 – murder more Italian and American prisoners.”
History magazines sometimes publish
articles about what a nice lad General Rommel was, a worthy opponent and all
that (stuff), and kind to kittens and children.
No, it just won’t do. Rommel was
a Nazi general. His career choice was to
travel to other countries and then destroy them, killing lots of people while
doing so. But then, hey, maybe he was
just trying to find himself.
A Nazi connection sells spy stories – any formula-plotted
thriller will sell if a big ol’ swish-sticker (remember the subtle obscene gesture
by the housemaid in Mrs. Miniver?) adorns the cover. Such stories always begin on a dark, narrow, bleak,
foggy, smells-of-cooking-cabbage, wartime London street where our hero (1)
stumbles across a corpse bearing Secret Papers, and then (2) finds his way to
an old building which discreetly houses a Special Branch of MI5, MI6, MI6 1/2,or
MI7 which is more Special Branchy than any other Special Branch, and in which a
mysterious Colonel Ponsonby-Snitt rules over a mysterious league of mysterious
functionaries who hold the mysterious key – there’s always a key, real or
metaphorical – which is going to win the war against jolly Rommel.
Zombies and vampires – I don’t get these
genres at all. If someone wants blood,
let him order a steak, rare. One reads
in the news that some teens – obviously not the smart ones – are in imitation
of vampire stories biting each other and swapping blood and, hence, bacteria
and viruses. Were they not listening to
parental teachings about basic hygiene and the myriads of blood-borne
diseases? Well, no. Over in the magazine section one can find
magazines devoted to tattoos and piercings.
The book retailer could efficiently combine the books on zombies,
vampires, tattoos, and piercings into one category: Disfigurement and Disease.
Books about the Tudors, especially Tudor
queens and girlfriends, are still big. A
nice side-effect is that readers also learn a little history.
Eat / Pray / Love / Drink / Vomit – How
many women who work at the fast-food joint or at Big Box get to leave all
behind and spend a year in Italy discovering themselves? Heck, most folks consider themselves lucky if
they can take the kids to Disney once or twice before the little boogers grow
up.
A recent fashion are books bearing covers
of vapid-looking girls wearing little caps with strings hanging down from them
– one infers that these books, and they are Legion, are about a beautiful but
misunderstood Hutterite / Amish / Mennonite girl who finds both Jesus and true
love in a buggy while a modest church steeple and some perfect trees pose
picturesquely in the background. But I
sure wouldn’t know, and never will.
Detective stories – Agatha Christie is
still the best. Hercule Poirot is my
hero. Well, okay, him, John Wayne,
Sergeant Schultz, and Bob Newhart.
Poetry – just keep moving; nothin’ to read
here. That which now passes for poetry is
pretty much me, me, me, my, my, my in content and free verse (which is a
contradiction) in non-structure tricked out with the shabbiest sort of rhetorical
bling. If the poet doesn’t dot the i he
must be really cool, right? There is neither passion nor intellect nor
aesthetics in contemporary poetry, only squalid self-pity flung like a
temper-tantrum onto the page.
Westerns – the selection is smaller than it
used to be. A current trend is to
publish the books that were made into films, which is a great idea. Anyone who thinks John Wayne was one-dimensional
has never seen The Searchers, John
Ford’s brilliant examination of racism and redemption.
Harry Potter appears to be hiding, at least
until the next movie comes out. The
first book in the series was mildly interesting, but then the next forty or
fifty were only the first book repackaged – cute kids scream at each other and
then fight Him / He Who Must Not Be Named and then some minor character gets
killed and then the cute kids reconcile with teary eyes and we learn about
friendship being The Most Important Thing.
Yawn.
Time for coffee.
-30-
Lady Macbeth's Cat - poem
Lawrence
Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Lady Macbeth’s Cat
Letting “I dare not” wait upon “I
would”
-Macbeth I.vii.48
Lady
Macbeth wrangled with Macbeth during dinner
At
cross purposes outside the banqueting hall
A
privy conference as to who was the worse sinner
She
thought him weak; he, that she was full of gall
She
wanted one thing, and he another
He
yelled that she was unreasonable and demanding
She
screamed that he never liked her mother
And
on and on, outside on the landing
The
argument was about, as it came to pass,
What
dress she should wear to the king’s funeral mass
Afterword:
Oh,
and that’s all to the story, no more than that;
She
had little to say about the cat
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
Q is a Letter in the Alphabet - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Q is a Letter in the Alphabet
And
that’s pretty much it, between P and R
Our
teachers made us carve it as a curvy 2
Which
is illogical because no one
Then
wrote about 2uadrilaterals or 2ueens
A
Q is not a Delphic Oracle
Nor
is it The Lost Transistor of Mars
Whispering
Barsoomian secrets in code
Transmitted
through albino Calvinists
Q
is a letter in the alphabet -
And
we are rational children of God
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Books are Secret Spaces - poem
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Books are Secret Places
Books
are secret places where words go to hide
When
the world goes wrong, and children are hurt
By
grownups who never learned how to read or love
Or
even tell funny stories around the campfire
Books
are secret places where stories go to hide
When
there’s shooting and looting, and children are hurt
By
grownups who never think of anything beyond
What
their clever leaders tell them to do
Books
are secret places where poems go to hide
When
museums are looted, and children are hurt
By
grownups who can see only ideologies
And
never the good, the true, the beautiful
Books
are sacred vessels: read them, love them -
They
hold our civilization in trust
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