Fashionable Poems Custom-Fit for Each Customer - a link

 Light Raindrops Upon the Withered World – LogoSophia Magazine

Silencing Rooster Cogburn - weekly column, 28 August 2022

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Silencing Rooster Cogburn

 

True Grit appeared on the Orwellian telescreen the other night, and I found myself watching that wonderful film yet again.

 

The climax of the film comes when John Wayne as Marshal Rooster Cogburn confronts Robert Duvall’s Lucky Ned Pepper and his gang. After a few prefatory remarks of ritual verbal abuse, Ned sneeringly demands that Rooster state his intentions or get out of the way.

 

“I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned, or see you hanged in Fort smith at Judge Parker’s convenience,” replies Rooster. “Which’ll it be?”

 

After some wonderfully Snidely Whiplash laughter from the desperadoes, Ned taunts Rooster with, “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man!”

 

And then comes The Moment – The Moment, The Academy Award Moment - when Rooster challenges Ned and his entire gang with perhaps the most famous line in the history of cinema…

 

But the line was not spoken; The Moment never came.

 

The center, the axis, the climax of this great film was silenced for television by some officious busy-body.

 

While Rooster spins his rifle in a menacing manner and Ned and the lads are laughing at him, let us pause and consider the insensitivities that have preceded this moment in True Grit:

 

1.   Tom Chaney murders Mattie’s father with a gutshot.

2.   Three prisoners are hanged on the courthouse square before a mocking crowd which includes children

3.   A federal marshal repeatedly handles prisoners with inappropriate roughness and occasional brutality.

4.   A Chinese character is stereotyped, although we must admit that he gives the marshal a good what-fer when necessary.

5.   There is some casual stereotyping of American Indians.

6.   The body count in the film would require a statistician, and the deaths are gruesome.

7.   Several adults threaten the life of a child.

8.   A child shoots an adult.

9.   As for Mattie’s snide remarks about Texas senators and bird dogs, we should let them stand with some sympathy for bird dogs.

 

Dozens die in the film, but That Line, that Academy Award line without which the story would fail to be true to the vision of the book’s author and the artistry of the film’s professionals, must apparently not be spoken lest it give offense to the delicate among us.

 

Look, the metaphor Rooster uses in the uncut version is pretty rough, and on the lips of almost anyone else would come across as adolescent potty-mouth-ness. But in the context of this great film and as spoken by John Wayne, yep, it’s a work of art.

 

But what about the children who might hear it?

 

The prime duty in raising a child belongs to the parent.

 

Thus, the parent must guide his (the pronoun is gender-neutral) child’s cultural experiences.

 

After all, it is pointless and indeed hypocritical to give a child unrestricted access to a MePhone or the InterGossip and then demand that a cinema, an author, an artist, a public library, a museum, or other cultural milieux surrender their freedom of cultural exchanges with other adults.

 

In sum, know when to turn off the television in your own house. That’s your decision, not someone else’s

 

-30-

An Extended Warranty - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

An Extended Warranty

 

You buy something and the man behind the counter

Asks you if you want to pay extra for a warranty

And when you ask why, doesn’t the gadget work

He’s grumpily ready for you to move on

 

Most things in life don’t have extended warranties:

Love, Hershey bars, tree frogs on the window screen

The John Wayne movie machine that broke long ago

But memories of MeeMaw are always fresh

 

You live through pain, and He who is beyond the stars

Gives it meaning – that’s the warranty

Trust the Official Texas State God - That's an Order

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Trust the Official Texas State God – That’s an Order

 

Some say

“All of us worship the same god, you know”

But what makes them think that this is so?

 Is ‘In God We Trust’ an assertion of Christian nationalism or of American history in public schools? – Baptist News Global

Texas schools hanging 'In God We Trust' signs after new state law requiring donated signs be posted | Fox News

Thoreau-ly August - doggerel about the heat

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Thoreau-ly August

 

“The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation,”

Protested Thoreau in hopeless exasperation.

One would not enter into disputation

With a famous writer of great reputation

 

But

 

Alas that here our lives are rank perspiration!

 

-      From The Road to Magdalena, 2012

(Available on amazon)

Allusions to DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, Patrick McGoohan's THE PRISONER, Kafka, Orwell, and Mordor

 

Dear Anonymous Google Accuser:

 

Thank you for your note, the contents of which sound much like the block warden’s caution (“Your attitude is noticed, comrade.”) to Yuri in the film version of Doctor Zhivago.

 

I have re-read the column, which I wrote nine years ago, and find nothing offensive in it (although it is rather puerile), nor do you detail exactly what is offensive in it and why I should be sanctioned. You are being Kafka-esque, and I say this as someone who has read Kafka: you do not tell me what offense I have purportedly committed nor do you face me with an accuser. You do not even face me with you, for you do not give your name. You employ the passive voice in referring to an “Adult Content policy” and to “Community Guidelines,” which sounds like something from an episode of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner: “The Committee won’t like this, Number Six.”

 

Google (and one could find “google” offensive, with its history mocking someone’s physical characteristics) is a private company, and so is free to publish or not publish, as is only right.  And I am free to pity Google for moral, ethical, and literary cowardice.

 

I was raised in situational poverty, barely graduated from high school, and spent 18 months in Viet-Nam. Upon returning to the USA (with life-long skin cancer which the DVA denies) I worked straight nights (double shifts on weekends) as an ambulance driver and later an LVN to put myself through university. I taught for almost forty years in public school, community college, and university as an adjunct instructor of no status whatsoever. In retirement I volunteered with our local school’s reading program until the Covid ended that, and I still volunteer with the lads at the local prison. I volunteer in community cleanup after our hurricanes (tho’ I’m getting a little old for that). I’ve worked hard all my life, paid my taxes, paid off my house at age 70, receive only half of my Social Security because of some vague law, and never gamed the system. Indeed, I would say that the system has gamed me.

 

And was all of this so that some frightened committee of anonymous inquisitors staring at an Orwellian telescreen or a Mordor-ish Palantir could find an innocuous scribble insensitive?

 

Pffffft.

 

Sincerely,

 

Lawrence Hall

 

 

Pontifex Minimus - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Pontifex Minimus

 

I met a man who once lived under a bridge

He said that was when he was happiest

But he found Jesus and civilization

So they put him in prison

He likes having a bed and three meals each day

But he misses his bridge

A Woman Hollering and a Train Passing By - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Woman Hollering and a Train Passing By

 

Next to the post office sags a trailer house

Where a fat old woman in a onesie

Was grilling something in her littered yard

Maybe some hot dogs, or just some dogs

 

A cigarette bounced about on her lip

As she screamed at me for driving by her life

Possibly she thought I was after her beer cans

Or her virtue, or her front-porch couch

 

A Santa Fe freight blew by, obscuring her words

And I accelerated, escaping her sorrows

The Prince-Poet-Cat of Gatineau, Quebec - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

The Prince-Poet-Cat of Gatineau, Quebec

 

For Pushkin, of Happy Memory

And His House Pets Abbie and Alexander

 

In an ice-cream summer in the long ago

I met a marvelous cat in Gatineau

 

Pushkin by name, a fastidious Russian

His shiny fur coat never needed brushin’

 

He purred in an elegant iambic tetrameter

Precisely in its orderly parameter

 

A cat, of course, needn’t meter his speech

For a cat is a poem whose motions teach:

 

Running

Leaping

Sleeping

Purring

pouncing

Growling

Yowling

Howling

Twitching

Lurking

Sneaking

Posing

Dreaming

Snuggling

 

While in all things giving his children delight

 

In an ice-cream summer in the long ago

I met a marvelous cat in Gatineau

if We Change Channels All the Pain Will Go Away - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

If We Change Channels All the Pain Will Go Away

 

Captors are shooting trembling prisoners of war

We can watch them writhing as they die

Screaming silently into our telescreens

American Idol is on 282

Are We but Obscure Lines in Ezekiel? - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Are We but Obscure Lines in Ezekiel?

 

Maybe we are doing time along the Chebar

But we are not in Babylonian captivity

Only in the captivity of our choices:

We fouled our own endeavors, our own lives

 

We banned and burned our books, our music, our art

Upon the orders of megaphone fuhrers

Sacrificing Truth on their altars of fear

We abandoned duty and found ourselves alone

 

Dry bones, dry bones in a desert of despair

But, shush – what is that Sound from over there…?

 

Whatever Happened to Clarence Eustace Scrubb? - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

 

Whatever Happened to Clarence Eustace Scrubb?

 

He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators

or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.

 

-C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 

 

He was so good at banning ideas that later

They made him a Texas school administrator

 

 

Keller ISD to remove challenged books | The Texas Tribune

(You will of course remember that in Mr. Lewis' wonderful book Scrubb became a fine young man at the end. There is also hope for book banners, book banners, and censorious old biddies of both sexes - may their eyes open soon to the joys of 10,000 years of literature!)

Strippers Bid to Unionize in Los Angeles - rhyming couplet

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Strippers Bid to Unionize in Los Angeles

 

-news item

 

To what enormity is this action owed –

Could there be an issue with the strict dress code?

Veterans' Cremation Benefits - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Veterans’ Cremation Benefits

 

-Ad on the InterGossip

 

AMTRACS with gas tanks beneath the floor

White phosphorus grenades gone bad, gone wrong

The Parrot’s Beak burning throughout the night

Napalm, burning flesh, screams, horror, death

 

A burnt man flailing about in agony

And where the hell is that dust-off now?

Copper sulphate, Sulfamylon, Kerlix, Telfa pads

We know about cremation well enough

 

But now tell us about our benefits

A Librarian is Your Fairy Godmother - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Librarian is Your Fairy Godmother

 

For Miss Kelly,

Who Captured the Castle

 

A librarian is your fairy godmother

Who blesses her children with the gift of books

Her magic wand is a date-due stamp

Which just for you she will then ignore

 

She lives with brave Cassie in Mississippi

And in the greenwood with bold Robin Hood

On Wildcat Island, in Narnia and Middle-Earth -

She sails you there on bean-bag pirate ships

 

And if you’re nice to others (so please don’t tickle)

There might be a gift of watermelon pickle!

After We Shoot the Traitors Let's Go for a Hamburger - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG

mhall4618@aol.com

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

After We Shoot the Traitors Let’s Go for a Hamburger

 

Th’ devil’s in control; you could look it up

It’s right there in some righteous Christian podcasts

An’ we need to be armed against th’ Left

Like them pizza child molesters and stuff

 

I got me my AR-15 against them devils

DON’T CALL IT AN ASSAULT RIFLE!!!!!

It’ll blow uh liberal’s head right off

DON’T CALL IT AN ASSAULT RIFLE!!!!!

 

And this is a REPUBLIC, not a DEMOCRACY!

If they mess up my fry order I’m gonna shoot someone

Lines Written Upon the Occasion of the Confiscation of the Former President's Several Passports, Which May or May Hot Have Happened - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

Lines Written Upon the Occasion of the Confiscation of the Former President’s Several Passports, Which May or May Not Have Happened

 

A flight risk? No, not that wretched has-been –

No civilized nation would allow him in!

Hurricane Disaster Relief Kits - weekly column, 14 August 2022

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Hurricane Disaster Relief Kits

 

This summer the Bishop of Beaumont is promoting a good idea and the organizational skills to make it so throughout the diocese: small, easily transportable plastic bags of needful items for anyone displaced by hurricanes, fires, tornadoes, or other disasters.

 

And in this part of the world, all of us have been displaced, and will be again. Hurricanes and flooding have sent us on the road or onto the boats, sometimes without a known destination. Some of us have bank accounts and credit cards and places to go; many don’t. And the places we go or the places we where we are isolated might not have the systems in place or the supplies to accomplish transactions. You can’t buy a band-aid or a razor or a towel if alligators are swimming through the muck where the grocery store used to be.

 

Many churches and other service organizations provide food, cooked when possible and as boxes of field rations when not, portable shower units, tents, tarps, first-aid, and other necessities for life as refugees.

 

The bishop’s throw-and-go (No, don’t actually throw it; you’d hurt someone) bags of non-food (and thus non-perishable) items are adjuncts, something to be handed out through existing services or by themselves as necessary. He has asked every family in the diocese to package a standard but flexible list of items sealed in a waterproof plastic bag to contribute to disaster relief. These kits are then stored in spaces in churches and rectories, ready for immediate giveaway to those headed to safety. The list:

 

One bath towel

Two wash cloths

Three bars of bath soap

One hairbrush

Three disposable razors

One can of shaving cream

Two toothbrushes

One tube of toothpaste

One stick of deodorant

One container of skin lotion

One small general-purpose first-aid kit

One package of ball point pens

One container of multi-purpose anti-bacterial ointment

One small LED flashlight

 

Many of these items wouldn’t require a new purchase. Most of us have good old towels and wash clothes that can be freshly laundered and packed. After all, someone under a bridge trying to get the kid cleaned up while the storm is blowing isn’t going to be picky about a new label and a brand name.

 

If you haven’t got three bars of soap, one would do, or maybe a couple of those little plastic bottles of shampoo pinched from the Holiday Inn.

 

Some things, such as hairbrushes and toothbrushes, ought to be new. Sure you can boil the germs and boogers and cooties out of them, but, still, new is better.

 

I saw one of these throw-and-go kits stocked, but on the list the first-aid kit notation was lined out and replaced with a box of band-aids. That’s a practical substitution.

 

Tiny little flashlights can now be bought cheaply by the dozen and they are so useful. We have so many illuminated gadgets in our houses that not until a power failure do we realize how dark the night is for us diurnal creatures. A flashlight is not only something for helping us see, but to be seen by – in addition to our voices, difficult to locate in the darkness, the rescuers can also see a light for determining location.

 

What shoulda / coulda / woulda been on the list is certainly a topic for discussion, but a sine qua non is that the distribution and handling of any one throw-and-go kit shouldn’t require a crew or any strength.  Putting these together is something all of us can do through our churches, volunteer organizations, schools, youth groups, and businesses.

 

In a disaster even the best and strongest among us cannot accomplish all that needs to be done. The little throw-and-go kits are a small contribution that anyone can make, and make now, before they are needed.

 

Those who will use them – because there will be hurricanes and evacuations - won’t know your name, nor will the bishop, but God certainly will.

 

-30-

 

Afghanistan: A Steady Diet of Invaders - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

A Steady Diet of Invaders

 

“And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,
 And the epitaph drear:  "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East”

 

-Kipling, “The Decline of the West”

 

This is the day, they say, that Kabul fell

A year ago - but Kabul did not fall

It’s still there: invaders come, invaders die

Pale British, Russians, and Americans

 

Afghanistan has eaten all of them

It even devours its own, and gnaws the bones

And all are dust along the Hindu Kush

Where lizards scuttle among imperial dreams

 

That land where caravans and mystics roam –

 

Let’s mind our own business and stay at home

.553 / Free to Be / Dead, You See - doggerel

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com 

https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/

poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

 

.553 / Free to Be / Dead, You See

"Sheathe your sword, Morville, before you impale

your soul upon it."

-Richard Burton as Becket 

When this weapon blows a child’s head off

Don’t worry about that trifle

For the AR technically

Is not an assault rifle