Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
President Biden: There's Going To Be A New World
Order,
It Hasn't Happened In A While And America Has To Lead
It
No
Monday, March 21, 2022
Mr. Putin and Mr. Biden Trying on Napoleon Costumes - Discuss
Sunday, March 20, 2022
The Sunshine Protection Act - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Sunshine
Protection Act
Our Senate has passed the Sunshine Protection Act
And if Old Sol is a sentient being
(And most of us rather hope he is)
He will be much surprised to hear of it
We didn’t know the sun needed protecting:
He rises every day and gives us his best
His brightest “good morning” slanting across
Our happy dreams as they become our hopes
Some tell us that our star is a minor sun
But we’ve never met a finer one!
A Lawyer Who Bullies Children - weekly column, 3.20.2022
Lawrence Hall, HSG
A Lawyer Who Bullies Children
Last week there was an “incident” [Disney World ‘regrets’ performance by Texas high school’s
drill team at Magic Kingdom - NewsBreak] at Disney World: a dance
routine by a high school drill team with the Port Neches-Groves band during a
parade at Disney World.
“Incident,” it says. An incident. A high school dance
routine was an incident.
An attorney – let us call her Miz Grundy – decreed the
performance “racist” [Video of 'Racist' Routine That Spurred Disney World Apology
Gets 1.2M Views (newsweek.com)]:
Cuz
a bunch of kids in fringe chanting “scalp ‘em Indians, scalp ‘em” is honor,
right?
And any Natives who attend @pngisd should prolly just accept their classmates
dehumanizing them cuz “tradition”, right?
Shame on @DisneyParks hosting this. Nostalgic racism is RACISM. pic.twitter.com/ELsJHRgJlw
One is surprised to read that an attorney writes “cuz” for “because”
and “prolly” for “probably,” misplaces commas, capitalizes inappropriately, and
employs quotation marks for sarcasm. Puerile usage tends to compromise whatever
thesis one is trying to make.
Although the Port Neches-Groves band, including the Indianettes
(that usage is admittedly awkward), has visited the Magic Kingdom numerous
times in the past, this is the first time the habitually offended bothered to
notice.
A spokesperson for Disney (the happiest place on earth, and
so on) quickly flung the kids under the metaphorical bus, averring that a
charming and innocent dance routine does not reflect Disney’s “core values”
[Disney World ‘regrets’...].
The Disney Company produced and still profits from Song
of the South, Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter, Dumbo, The
Jungle Book, Peter Pan, and perhaps other films with inappropriate
depictions of different peoples, but they deflect from their own behaviors by piling
on the kids who participate and contribute.
These are the sort of young people we want, energetic and disciplined. But
they are being hammered (that’s a metaphor; the grim Miz Grundy might not
understand that) while the kids whose lives center on playing video games and
hanging out are unnoticed and thus not faulted.
None of us can sort out the often violent history of this
nation. We should do a better job than we have in the past, and deal with it
with honesty, humility, and self-reflection, not self-obsessed ideologies. It
is certain that none of the enormities of our troubled past can be addressed by
censoring, of all things, children’s dance routines.
Angry emails are soaring through the airwaves among Disney,
those who claim to represent the Indianettes, Miz Grundy, and the Cherokee
Nation Principal Chief.
Fine.
Have at it.
That’s democracy in action.
But leave the kids alone.
-30-
Saturday, March 19, 2022
We Love our Geriatric Murder Mysteries - doggerel
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
We Love our Geriatric Murder Mysteries
We love our
geriatric murder mysteries:
Father Brown with
his parcels and brolly
Columbo and his
rambling histories
Inspector Barnaby
and Troy, by golly
Jessica Fletcher writing
novels Down East
Good Doctor Sloan
solving crime on the beach
Ben Matlock who
thinks hot dogs are a feast
Poirot and Miss
Marple, teacups in reach
Typewriters, file
folders, and telephones
And hidden behind
a wall –
the victim’s
bones!
Friday, March 18, 2022
The Song of the Rotor-Tiller is Heard in Our Land - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Song of the
Rotor-Tiller is Heard in Our Land
The tines are set for six inches
Today we harvest broken bits of glass
Fragments of old toys, bit of aluminum
A Sylvania flash cube still intact
From a picture taken decades ago
The tines are set for rich earth
Tomorrow we’ll plant sunflowers to sing
“Slava Ukraini!” In the summer sun
Tomatoes, zinnias, peppers in their zones
A little sweet corn and more flowers for fun
The tines are set for happiness
In this little garden-world of peace
Between the bee-pool and the olive tree
Thursday, March 17, 2022
We Write Our Words in Order to Give them Away - poem
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
We Write Our Words in Order to Give Them Away
Only connect
-Evelyn Waugh
All literature is
world literature
A culture that
hugs itself to itself
And refuses to
share and share alike
Consumes itself
in a closed loop, and dies
A mother sings to
see her baby smile
A farmer whistles
as he follows the plow
A poet speaks to
hear her words aloud
A seaman chants
his strength against the wind
All workers in
all languages create -
All literature is
world literature
Wednesday, March 16, 2022
William Wordsworth Receives an Email of Rejection - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
William Wordsworth
Receives an Email of Rejection
Dear Pronoun-of-Preference Wordsworth:
We have interrogated your poem about daffodils
And can only regret your lack of filtering
For post-colonial non-binary tropes
And gender-vulnerable intersectionality
The daffodils appear not to have been consulted
With regard for their self-affirmation
Which suggests patriarchal guilt through your
Hetero-normative stratification
We find your daffodils ruthlessly aggressive
And your masculinist constructs, yes, regressive
We wish you success elsewhere. Anywhere
Go away
Tuesday, March 15, 2022
Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Inmates - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Hitchhikers May Be
Escaping Inmates
A Sign Along a Texas Road
Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates
Newton is one way, and Jasper the other
Along the two-lane blacktop between the fields
A farmer in chambray blue cultivates his corn
And lads in prison whites
cultivate the state’s
Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates
The passerby wonders if the hitchhikers
Are escaping from inmates or if
The hitchhikers are the inmates who choose
Not to be inmates at the moment
Hitchhikers may be escaping inmates
And then there’s the difference between “may” and “might”
Hitchhikers and inmates, soon out of sight
Maybe we’re all trying to escape something
Monday, March 14, 2022
But Which Jaw Drops - the Upper? Or the Lower? - errant nonsense
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
But Which Jaw
Drops – the Upper? Or the Lower?
An advert assures us its product is jaw-dropping
If true, this loss of body parts would be painful
And which part of the purchaser’s jaw drops?
The upper jaw? The lower jaw? The set?
Given our recent experience with Nile.com
We can’t be sure of both jaws for one price
The advertisement might be for a set of jaws
But the small print says you have to pay extra
For a complete jaw-jaw
As a dime-store guru from the 60s might ask
What is the sound of one jaw dropping?
Dropping
Dropping
Dropping
(Clunk!)
Sunday, March 13, 2022
I Don't Know How Life Can Go On - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
I Don’t Know How
Life Can Go On
Life can be an impossible hurdle
Just now I want to hide and turn turtle
My breakfast within me has begun to curdle
Because for the first time I lost the Wordle!
Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Dushen'ka - weekly column, 13 March 2022
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Do Not Forsake Me,
Oh, My Dushen’ka
Should Tex Ritter and John Wayne be cancelled as Russian
sympathizers?
Imagine Tex Ritter, that good ol’ Panola County boy,
singing a western song composed by a veteran of the Soviet Red Army whose early
works include music for huge Communist spectacles. Who among us hasn’t joined
in to sing along with that merry toe-tapper, “The Storming of the Winter Palace?”
Imagine John Wayne hiring the same Russian musician for a
number of his movies as well as becoming his friend.
And it’s true, of course. Dmitri Tiompkin was born in the
Russian Empire in what is now Ukraine, was educated in Saint Petersburg / Petrograd
/ Leningrad, did some time in the Red Army, and made his way to Hollywood via
Berlin, Paris, and New York. Had he been able to find steady work in the USSR he
would later have been murdered in Stalin’s purges of thousands of artists,
poets, scholars, filmmakers, musicians, soldiers, childhood friends, old
comrades, Ukrainians, and, finally, physicians.
Tiompkin, a classically trained musician, was a biggie in
American films for almost fifty years, and won his first Oscar for High Noon,
including its title song, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh, My Darling.”
John Wayne famously disliked High Noon for its
purported Communist associations, although the Soviets criticized the film for its
“individualistic” protagonist. In this movie the solitary sheriff faces the
baddies with no help from the citizens except his Quaker wife.
As a response to High Noon John Wayne and Howard
Hawks made Rio Bravo which took the same situation – a solitary hero facing
a bunch of bad dudes – and reverses the concept by having the sheriff refuse
the help of the willing but untrained citizenry, who in the end show up anyway.
Both are brilliant American films, but one would be
required in film class with the sheriff as a protagonist; the other is a
Saturday afternoon yippee in which the sheriff is a hero. “Protagonist” is film
school; “hero” is old school. High Noon is in minimalist black-and-white
and Rio Bravo is in glorious Technicolor. High Noon is heavy with
introspection and existential philosophy, but Rio Bravo is pretty high
in thinky-ness too.
What High Noon really lacks, though, is Angie
Dickinson throwing a flowerpot through a saloon window.
Both films were scored by Dimitri Tiompkin. Wayne and
Hawks were hawks, all right, but they wanted their favorite Russian to make the
music, and no one could depict the old west as well as Tiompkin, who wrote in
his autobiography:
A steppe is a steppe is
a steppe.... The problems of the cowboy and the Cossack are very similar. They
share a love of nature and a love of animals. Their courage and their
philosophical attitudes are similar, and the steppes of Russia are much like
the prairies of America.
The point in all this is that neither Russians nor anyone
else should act like Communists or Putin-istas through acts of canceling, of
censorship, and we’ve been getting some of that lately. Recently we have seen
pictures of silly people pouring Russian vodka into sewers, which neglects the
reality that the Russians were already paid for the vodka. But some folks never
allow an opportunity for posturing to go by.
Many thousands of Russians are in prison right now for
protesting Mr. Putin’s illegal and unrestrained invasion of Ukraine. They
represent many more thousands of Russians who agree with them but are not yet
ready to be beaten in the streets, humiliated, arrested, imprisoned, and tortured.
They are not posturing. They are being censored and, in some cases, canceled – really
canceled - for disapproving of the mass murder of their Ukrainian neighbors.
When anyone suggests canceling or censorship, let us
remember that the First Amendment (Russia doesn’t have one of those) is all
about not canceling or censoring.
-30-
Saturday, March 12, 2022
Shifting the Clockfoolery Forward - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Shifting the Clockfoolery
Forward
“Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”
-Thoreau
This is the day we search out all the clocks:
Two in the den (in which no animals live)
One in the kitchen above the dishy sink
One in the dining room (it chimes the hours)
(the
clock, I mean; dining rooms do not chime)
One in the living room next to the piano
Five in the bedroom (I have no idea why)
(Unless I
should count clocks instead of sheep)
One in the guest bathroom (its battery is dead)
One in the guest room for guests to see
Three in my office (Mr. Spock tells time)
One on the patio for wasps to buzz
And all the old watches which are not smart
And pointlessly push them forward an hour
We often seem to be searching for time
But perhaps it is time who is searching for us
Friday, March 11, 2022
The Empires That Might Have Been - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Empires That Might Have Been
“The empires of the future will be empires of the
mind.”
-attributed to Winston Churchill
Empires of the mind – what a glorious dream
A world of laboratories and libraries
Of beauty through truth, music, words, and art
The free exchange of ideas and discoveries
Ministers of state might have launched missives, not
missiles
In polished meter instead of heavy prose
And the worst of enemies would have shared
Champagne and verse on a veranda at dusk
While their children scampered in search of fireflies
Then giggled secrets on the porch of St. Michael’s Church
Thursday, March 10, 2022
On Reading Kaminsky's DEAF REPUBLIC - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
On Reading
Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic
Kaminsky takes our neat
constructions and breaks
Them back into
their atoms, primordial chaos
So that we are
reminded that before Creation
There were all those
silences laying around
Atoms reminded chaos bits that takes before
before before breaks
our and
n
e
a
t
primordial around are we Kaminsky constructions into back atoms them lying Creation
those silences reminded so were there
A poet organizes sounds into meanings
Kaminsky reminds us to pay closer attention
to the silences
Wednesday, March 9, 2022
The Russia Project - short poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Russia Project
I will give up my copy of The Brothers Karamazov
When they pry it from my cold, dead hands
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
Or Just Sit in the Car and Die - short poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
“Or Just Sit in
the Car and Die”
(overheard among the books)
Call Mom
Call Josh
Call an ambulance
Or just sit in the car and die
Monday, March 7, 2022
Pipe Tobacco and Memories - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Pipe Tobacco and Memories
Today I smelled tobacco from a pipe
Although there was no one around except
Perhaps the ghost of the hardware store savant
Whose wisdom filled the air along with smoke
That honest, manly incense from long ago
When the thinking man smoked a Peterson’s pipe
Dunhill could brag of a royal warrant
And Dr. Grabow was a sovereign cure
No, no, we must not smoke anymore
But we can remember those golden days
Sunday, March 6, 2022
Thanks to the Dim Bulbs - poem
Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Thanks to the Dim Bulbs
I needed a light bulb from the hardware store
And for a gadget three D-cell batteries
The light bulb was nine dollars (I passed it by)
But bought the batteries for eight dollars each
I think we’re all going to be shopping more now
In the recesses of closets and kitchen shelves
And maybe behind the dryer for an errant sock
And stretching the sell-by dates a week or two
But let us be thankful that we do have light bulbs
And rooms in which to enjoy their glow
Yevtushenko and Ukraine - weekly column, 6 March 2022
(I apologize - this one’s a
mess. Vehemence is no excuse for poor craftsmanship.)
Lawrence Hall
Yevtushenko and
Ukraine
Upon returning home from a boomer-privileged visit to Viet-Nam
I bought at the San Francisco airport a copy of the Penguin edition of Yevtushenko:
Selected Poems. That little paperback, which cost me 75 cents in 1970, is
on the desk beside me as I type.
A new copy of that book is now $16.00. In 1970 a cup of airport
coffee was maybe 25 cents and now would be most of a tenner, so the book is
about the same price in terms of purchasing power.
Upon recently hearing the name Yevtushenko in connection
with Ukraine I looked on the InterGossip and learned that it is a common
Ukrainian name although Yevgeny was from Siberia. His family was part of a
forced resettlement generations ago and so Yevtushenko identified as a Russian.
He annoyed his fellow Russians as a Russian, not as a Ukrainian, but, hey, good
enough.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko was a poet, a biggie in his time, and
had he been born ten years earlier Stalin would have had him shot for his
criticism of Communist policies and of Russian anti-Semitism.
Yevtushenko’s best-known poem, “Babi Yar,” is the one that
would have won him a literary prize made of lead in the basement shooting range
of the Lubyanka.
Babi Yar is a huge ravine that in in 1941 was outside Kiev /
Kyiv and is now inside the city limits. In two days, 29-30 September 1941, the
Nazis murdered approximately 30,000 area Jews there, and over the next two
years murdered more Jews as well as Poles, Gypsies / Roma, partisans, Red Army and
Soviet Navy prisoners, writers, artists, musicians, psychiatric patients, nationalist
Ukrainians, and others.
After the war there was no monument in honor of any of the
victims. Given that the Jews were a substantial number, maybe half, of all the
dead at that one site the USSR wanted no memory of Babi Yar at all. Yevtushenko’s
poem, memorializing the massacres of Jews and other prisoners, somehow bypassed
the censors (no one did cancel culture like the Soviets, although it’s becoming
a fashion here), greatly annoying the regime but by then Yevtushenko was so
famous that killing him was not an option.
The USSR finally put up a vaguely-worded monument to all the
Russian dead but, given the anti-Semitism embedded in both Czarist and Soviet
times, any mention of Jews was pointedly avoided. Upon independence Ukraine
remedied this and there are numerous memorials to all the peoples massacred at
Babi Yar.
Yevtushenko, whose ego was even greater than his skill,
still managed to make much of the “Babi Yar” about himself, anticipating the
me-me-me-ness of what now passes for poetry in our culture of artlessness,
ideology and incessant self-pity, but it’s good anyway. And we should always
remember that Yevtushenko while writing had to consider the possibility of a
ten-year prison sentence or even of being “disappeared” for it.
Babi Yar is only one instance of the terror Ukraine suffered
in the 20th century. That land, the size of Texas, was a giant
battlefield among the armies of the Austrian Empire, the Russian Empire, local
militias, and Bolsheviks. After the revolution the Bolsheviks inflicted
genocide on Ukraine, transplanting some of the population to Siberia and
starving millions more to death in the Holodomor of 1932-1933.
During the Second World War the Nazis occupied Ukraine and
murdered more millions, and after the war the Communists returned to continue
their accustomed mass murders despite the reality that Ukrainians had served in
the Red Army in their thousands.
And then the Russians built poorly-designed nuclear power
plants in Ukraine and staffed them with good comrades instead of real engineers,
dumped wrecked nuclear submarines on the coast, and in general made a further
mess of things.
Let’s not do the gallant-little-Belgium thing here:
Ukrainians are sometimes a mess themselves, and the nation has had lots of
problems transforming itself from a Soviet penal colony to a free nation.
Still, Ukraine is a sovereign nation recognized by the otherwise useless Merovingians
in the United Nations and shouldn’t be subject to the sustained terror of a
neo-Soviet invasion ordered by Dobby-the-House-Elf and his harem of silent,
terrified fly-girls. Further, Ukraine is one of the few food-exporting nations,
and the war has already affected supply and costs here and everywhere else.
Ukraine also exports iron and oil and gas, and is an east-west pipeline
corridor for the transfer of energy.
I am the only man in America without a plan for the Ukraine.
I do not know what we should do or can do. This nation abandoned some of its
own citizens in Afghanistan as well as tanks, artillery, airplane, radar
systems, small arms, drones, bombs, fuel, transport vehicles and other weapons in
great quantities that could have been more than enough to provide Ukraine the
power to repel the Russian invasion.
And yet little help is being offered to Ukraine.
We’re paying for those bad choices with cash and Ukrainians
are paying with their blood. Our well-fed and well-protected generals in their
tailor-made pinks and greens are pleased to appear at government functions in
D. C. while Ukrainian children are either terrified refugees or rotting
fragments of flesh in bombed-out streets.
We need to do some serious thinking. Those in power in this
nation need to get off the golf course and do even more thinking and then
accomplish some of that metaphorical heavy lifting.
What will some future Yevtushenko write about how we responded
when millions of suffering people - hungry, cold, bombed-out, blown-out, constantly
under fire, standing to their posts in the snow against the cruel Russian army,
air force, and navy - asked us for help?
-30-
Saturday, March 5, 2022
The Ashes of Lent Fall Upon Ukraine - poem
Lawrence Hall
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
The Ashes of Lent Fall Upon Ukraine
“Remember, man...”
In Ukraine this year, grey ashes fall
Grey ashes of Lent
that fall on everyone
Whether they will
have them or not -
The still-warm ashes
of our fellow man
“That thou art
dust...”
In Ukraine this
season, grey ashes fall
There is no line;
the ashes wait instead
Among the
swirling smoke to present themselves -
This tiny speck
of ash was someone’s child
“And unto dust
thou shalt return”
In Ukraine this
season, grey ashes fall
And cover civilization
as its funeral pall
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