Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
A Polar Bear’s
Diet
Do polar bears caution each other about
The dangers of eating human livers?
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
A Polar Bear's Diet - poem
Tuesday, December 7, 2021
When Your Friends Let You Down, Maybe That's a Good Thing - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
When Your Friends
Let You Down – Maybe That’s a Good Thing
St. Luke 5:17-26
Letting a pal down through a hole in the roof
To free him from paralysis and sins
Sounds much like a Larry, Darryl, and Darryl goof
And maybe it is – we are blessed in our friends
Monday, December 6, 2021
He Never Met a Phor He Didn't like - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
He Never Met a Phor He Didn’t Like
He never met a phor he
didn’t like
Where the dead are always
spinning in their graves
A discarded cup looks like
a war zone
And poems are unpacked
instead of read
Or hyperbole ‘WAY OVER THE
TOP!!!!!!!!!!!!
OMG! OMG! OMG! OH!!!!!!!!
MY LIFE HAS BEEN CHANGED
FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!
NO ONE HAS EVER SUFFERED
AS MUCH AS I!!!!!!!!
And freighted his lines
with adverbs in rank
Until they really actually
literally sank
Banners That Fan Our People Cold - doggerel
Inferior doggerel, not otherwise posted
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Banners That Fan
Our People Cold
Where
the Norweyan banners flout the sky
And
fan our people cold
-Macbeth I.i.49-50
Banners for sale, strung on lines in the breeze
Not an American flag among the lot
But only parodies and mockeries -
Betray your country with cash on the spot
In the name of freedom a tyrant’s face
Falsely imposed over our red, white, and blue
Children will ask, in their innocent grace:
“Mommy, whatever does F*** mean to you?”
These are not our good brave flags of old
But only foulness that fans our people cold
Sunday, December 5, 2021
All Children by Nature Have a Desire to Learn - weekly column, 5 December 2021
Lawrence Hall, HSG
All Children by
Nature Have a Desire to Learn
“All men by nature have a desire to know.”
-Aristotle, p. 3 of Man in the Universe in the 1943
Classics Club edition
We would now say “all men and women,” that is, if the
fashionable among us will allow Aristotle a voice at all.
Once upon a time I was sitting in the car reading,
waiting for the spouse-person who was yakking with some other women after Mass.
Suddenly I noticed a little boy standing next to me at the window. He said, “You
look like Father Brown.”
Well, any little boy who reads G. K. Chesterton has
certainly been raised right, and I was pleased to meet him.
The little boy is now taller than I am, but for me he
will always be that kid was a strong reader even when he was so small he was
only about car-window high.
His name is not Jacques, nor is his little sister’s name
Chantel, but give the unhappy temper of our time I will not reveal their true
names, the town in which they live, nor the school they attend. Things have
just gotten too weird.
Because they live far, far away I see Jacques and Chantel
only a few times each year when they come to visit their grandparents, but it
is always fun to hear what books they are reading, what new music they have
learned, and how their summer jobs are going.
This is because their parents have given them love not
only in food, clothing, and shelter, but in making their home a library, a
music studio, an art museum, and a science laboratory. The farm animals are
outside.
A few months ago their mom posted from their living room a
video clip of Chantal singing a solo and Jacques accompanying her on a (viol? viola?).
As the song says, if you’re gonna play in Texas you gotta have a fiddle in the
band. Big fiddle. [Alabama - If You're Gonna Play In Texas (You Gotta Have A
Fiddle In The Band) Lyrics | AZLyrics.com]
Well, okay, they’re rich folks who can afford to send
their kids to fancy-schmancy schools, right?
Nope. Two working parents and an ordinary public school
in Texas.
Jacques and Chantel, you see, were never permitted to
feel sorry for themselves and submit to the Sauron’s eye that is the
InterGossip. They have always had to work, study, and try to get along with
their fellow humans.
Recently their mom sent a video of Jacques (but not
Chantel, who was in a different program) in a Christmas presentation by their high
school’s madrigal club. All the young folks were in beautiful costumes along
the mediaeval-renaissance continuum (I know nothing about fashion) except for
one who seemed to be a pirate, but, hey, good fun! The musical presentations of
old – as in olde – Christmas hymns and Christmas carols, along with some contemporary
just-plain-fun songs were outstanding: professional in voices, professional in
musical talent, and professional in stagecraft, and obviously professional
through months of disciplined rehearsals. It can only have been difficult.
I don’t know who the music teacher is, but she does a
fantastic job in leading her students.
On this night, the kids got to have some fun, and they
certainly did – such energy!
We’ve all been to school musical presentations and often
suffered through them. We smile through the sixth-grade band’s pieces when what
we really want to do is cover our ears. We applaud the children not because the
strange noises they’ve made are objectively good but because the children gave
it a go at all and we want to encourage them.
Okay, sometimes we want to encourage the brass to
practice in the next county, but, hey, childhood.
However, the Christmas-themed program staged by Jacques
and his fellow high school musicians was objectively good. The applause was not
aw-ain’t-they-cute applause but real wow-they-are-great applause. With discipline, practice, and the handing on
of civilization from one generation to the next you get something good.
Only some hours later did I wonder if all those good, smart,
talented, hard-working young people had been patted down for firearms.
All men and women by nature have a desire to know; all
children by nature have a desire to know. The question for us is this: what
do we give our children to know?
-30-
Cranky Catholics - and Whose Fault is That? - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
And Whose Fault is
That?
Then
said Jesus unto the twelve, “Will you also go away?”
Then
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go?
You
have the words of eternal life.”
Catholics are much disapproved of these days
And whose fault is that?
Catholics even disapprove of each other
And whose fault is that?
Lawsuits and lockouts and altars abandoned
And whose fault is that?
The ‘net all clogged with angry Catholic sites
And whose fault is that?
Well, yeah, mine too
We are perfectly free to go away
But we won’t – because He asks us to stay
Saturday, December 4, 2021
All the Little Midnight Lights - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
All the Little Midnight
Lights
To awaken in the middle of the night
Is to realize that this midnight dream
Is a fairyland of points of light
Arcing and soaring like a magic stream
The curious visions before your flickering eyes
Begin to focus as strange, blue-lit scenes
In a half-awake haze you realize
The lights are from all your little machines
Manufactured by men, mechanical light
And somehow that just doesn’t seem quite right
Friday, December 3, 2021
The Old Sears Store Remains Unsold - rhyming couplet
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Old Sears Store
Remains Unsold
The big Sears store was a happy place
But now it’s only an empty space
Thursday, December 2, 2021
Children and Machine Gun Dreams - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
By word and example…parents lead their children to authentic freedom, actualized in the sincere gift of self, and they cultivate in them respect for others, a sense of justice, cordial openness, dialogue, generous service, solidarity, and all the other values which help people to live life as a gift.
-St. John Paul
the Great, Evangelium Vitae
Do we sing to our
children machine gun dreams
Instead of sugar
plums? Little sleepyheads
Now tucked away
into their little beds
In matching
camouflage blankies and sheets
Do children code
messages to Santa asking him
For Barbie’s Bunker
all accessorized
With guns and
knives properly pint-sized
And Super Sniper
Skipper and Recon Ken?
Do children hide
bayonets beneath their coats
And measure the distance
to their classmates’ throats?
Wednesday, December 1, 2021
All Power to the People's Soviet of Gadgetry - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
All Power to the People’s
Soviet of Gadgetry
1.
The servile arts teach us to plan
Wars for sending our children to die
Barbed wire for penning our fellow man
Computers to sneak and snoop and spy
2.
The liberal arts teach us to ask
Why?
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Las Vegas, Geographically Speaking - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Las Vegas, Geographically
Speaking
Upon watching the 1960 Ocean’s Eleven
That oasis of Cool no longer exists
Except as road markers and artifacts
All else is gone: cigarette girls, ashtrays
Rotary telephones, Ford Galaxies
The glamour of cocktail dresses and tailored suits
Xanadu with electric lights and Scotch
Heliopolis with showgirls and cards
So Cool that no one ever called it Cool
And like those fragments of Ozymandias
All of that Cool is lost among the sands
Monday, November 29, 2021
A Man and His Dog at Sunday Mass - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
A Man and His Dog
at Sunday Mass
And
in what landscape of disaster
Has your unhappy spirit lost its road?
-Thomas Merton, “For my Brother - Missing in Action
1943”
His pilgrimage on earth is in his van
His clapped-out van, his one-man caravan
With an air-conditioner duct-taped in back
And his old dog next to him in the seat
At Mass he sits in back with his good old dog
His clothes are warm, he gets enough to eat
And, sure, a man and dog who approach their God
Together are good and faithful servants indeed
His pilgrimage on earth is in his van
His clapped-out van, his one-man caravan
And there is a dog
Sunday, November 28, 2021
We'll Trade You One Stealth Fighter for a Billion Vaccine Jabs - weekly column, 11,28.2021
Lawrence Hall, HSG
We’ll Trade You
One Stealth Fighter for a Billion Vaccine Jabs
A number of sources, including the Guardian (A new Covid variant is no surprise when rich countries are
hoarding vaccines | Gordon Brown | The Guardian) are blaming the new
Covid variants on “rich countries” (that invariably means you and me) for
hoarding vaccines.
Poor countries, you see, can’t get any vaccines because Canada,
the U.S., the U.K., and France are keeping them all, rather like Gollum clutching
that ring while chanting, “My precious! My precious!”
I suppose I’d better dig up those sealed barrels of
vaccines I buried in my back yard and turn them over to Medicins sans
Frontieres (who also blame us) with an abject apology.
And you, good friends, need to check your closets and
cupboards for all those bottles of vaccines you’ve stockpiled next to pallets
of toilet paper, bottled water, and the complete collection of Wheel of
Fortune: The Lost Episodes. Gather all those vaccines and turn them
over to the INTERPOL officers who will land at the nearest intersection in
unmarked UN helicopters.
You can tell they’re UN helicopters because they’re
unmarked.
In truth, I aver that I might be the only man in America
who admits he doesn’t know doodlysquat about the coronavirus. I know only this: I have occasion to sit in
the same room with nurse practitioners, nurses, physicians, and physicians’
assistants, all of whom attended real medical schools, not The University of Google,
not The University of Gossip, and not The University of Some Loudmouth on
Television. I listen to what the nurse practitioners, nurses, physicians, and
physicians’ assistants who are in the room with me tell me about all sorts of
medical topics affecting my brief life on this earth, and I do what they recommend.
They know medicine. I know them. I trust them. As Martin Luther (otherwise not
one of my favorite people) said, “Here I stand; I can do no other.”
The only other medical thing I know is that the full-body
scanner that beamed across me last summer in a room that looked like the bridge
of the starship Enterprise had all sorts of pretty little lights on it
and made soft, susurrant, soporific sounds that almost put me to sleep.
Oh, and I can operate a Band-Aid.
But that’s it.
Given my trust in professionals with whom I can speak
face-to-face rather than screen-to-screen, I tend not to believe the metaphorical
medical mudslides on the InterGossip. The idea that a gang of Snidely
Whiplashes in Washington, Ottawa, London, and Paris are withholding vaccines
from poor nations who don’t seem to be so poor that they can’t afford the
latest weaponry appears to be just another variant on blaming others for one’s
own failings.
Pharmaceuticals are developed and manufactured by
companies interested in their profits. They want to sell drugs, not lock them
away in a variant (so to speak) of Uncle Scrooge’s money vault. The leaders of
companies and countries are not always the most ethical, but it is not in their
interests, whether in profits or philanthropy, to withhold vaccines from other
nations.
Beyond that, those nations who focus on accumulating
weapons and Swiss bank accounts could probably vaccinate all their peoples
against all sorts of diseases by foregoing a single new jet fighter.
But then, prudent budgeting should obtain here too: how
many luxury aircraft and armored limousines does ONE president need?
-30-
The Taste of Covid - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Taste of Covid
“Never give in…”
-Mr. Churchill, 29 October 1941
Coffee is metallic, as is my morning toast
Most everything else is vague, fuzzy, and flat
As if the world needed a pinch of salt
And that’s okay; it’s good to be alive
They say that there’s another variant or wave
Named Mu or Omicron or maybe Bob
Slithering ashore through Grendelian mists
We take our jabs in defiance because
We all have casualty lists of friends we miss
That’s not okay, and so we will never give in
(Still, I don’t know why
the coffee should be metallic)
Saturday, November 27, 2021
Advent - a Gift of Becoming - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Advent – a Gift of Becoming
“The old order changeth, yielding place to new”
-“The Coming of Arthur” and “The Passing of Arthur” in Idylls of the King
There is much to be said for Ordinary Time
Its very ordinariness is kind to us
The daily hours that end with the Vespers chime
Free of formation and pageantry
But Advent comes as part of the dance
Of seasons wheeling through the universe
And we must shift our thoughts back into time
In anticipation of the Nativity
In solitary splendor a wonderful Star
Gives us light for our pilgrimage renewed
Friday, November 26, 2021
Trytophan Dreams after Thanksgiving Dinner - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Tryptophan Dreams
after Thanksgiving Dinner
(channeling our inner Dorothy Parker)
Sleepy now, from excess of meat and cup
But unlike the poor turkey, we will wake up!
Thursday, November 25, 2021
Autumn is Life Writing its Autobiography - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Autumn is Life
Writing its Autobiography
Autumn is not the end of summer, nor yet
Is autumn the beginning of winter; it is
Itself. Autumn is not between anything
Autumn is the culmination of seasons
The seed that slept beneath winter’s cold death
Arose in spring, a resurrection of itself
And grew its summer strength through work and sweat
And in September finished, and mopped its brow
Surveying all its cosmography
Autumn is life writing its biography
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Face Masks and Hippie Hymns - poem
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
Face Masks and
Hippie Hymns
At Mass I breathe behind and through a mask
My custom still, one of the paper-faced few
Although one might with some good reason ask
If it serves much purpose in a crowded pew
Each humid exhalation clouds the lens
Of my eyeglasses so I can’t even read
But I’m sure I know how each lesson ends
Needless to say I’ve memorized the Creed
And to mask those sandwich hymns:
I make hidden faces when the soloist croons
Another of those awful hippie tunes
(Has anyone told the music
director that the 1960’s are over?)
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
Book Reviewers Promote Freedom by Giving Orders - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Book Reviewers Promote
Freedom by Giving Orders
“Obey me and be free!”
-Number Six in the Free for All episode of The
Prisoner
The irony of the imperative in most reviews
Is to make a command that the reader must heed
Keeping in chains the literary muse:
You must read this must-read which you need to read
(now back to weaving
tapestries of this and that)
Monday, November 22, 2021
The Number of the Beast is .556 - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Number of the
Beast is .556
“This is my rifle. There are many like it”
Because they fall off assembly lines everywhere
Probably even in the Khyber Pass
And frankly, son, you don’t need the damned thing
A rifle is not your friend; it is a mechanical thing
A rifle is an engine of destruction
It is made for killing your fellow humans
The last one alive wins madness and guilt
You never made the first day of boot camp
(neither
did John Wayne)
You need to know what John Wayne never knew:
A .556 disintegrates a child
A .556 vaporizes your soul
A variant:
The Number of the
Beast is .556
“This is my rifle. There are many like it”
Because they fall off assembly lines everywhere
Probably even in the Khyber Pass
And frankly, son, you don’t need the damned thing
A rifle is not your friend; it is a mechanical thing
A rifle is an engine of destruction
It is made for killing your fellow humans
The last one alive wins madness and guilt
You never made the first day of boot camp
(neither
did John Wayne)
You need to know what John Wayne never knew:
A .556 disintegrates a child
A .556 vaporizes your soul
If you
finish recruit training and A.I.T.
And
have your orders in hand
then I’ll listen
But
if you come back
you’ll not want to talk
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