Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Does
the Moon Write Back?
Sometimes I wonder: does the moon
ever write
A poem about me or you?
Friday, February 10, 2023
Does the Moon Write Back? - very short poem
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Everybody Writes a Poem About the Moon - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Everybody
Writes a Poem About the Moon
Everybody writes about the moon
Often trying to force a balky
rhyme
Along the continuum of spoon and
croon
Which just won’t fill the bill,
the quill, or the time
But the moon is there, whether we
write or not
Silver and cool, beyond our scribbled
praise
In contrast to the sun, golden
and hot
Promoting himself through all of
summer’s days
Everybody writes about the moon
Who in her being is all the rhyme
we need
Tuesday, February 7, 2023
What Communists Learned from History - weekly column, 5 February 2023
Lawrence Hall, HSG
What Communists
Learned from History
Maxwell Smart and The Chief conferring under The Cone of
Silence might have come up with a more effective method of downing the Chinese
spy balloon than our Space Command or whatever it is we’ve got defending us
from The Helium Peril.
Yes, we do have a Space Command [Home (spacecom.mil)]
complete with all sorts of costumes, a theme song entitled “The Space Force
March,” and seven “warfighting units” – yes, that’s what they’re called,
“warfighting units” - with cool shoulder patches.
Photographs show that the Space Command features at least
six different kinds of attractive uniforms, so if this nation cannot control
its own skies it can at least control fashion shows.
One of the uniforms is of a forest leaf pattern, which is
curious given that spacecraft and space itself are devoid of forests.
According to its own site the Space Command is responsible
for defending us against threats (maybe Klingons?) more than 100 kilometres
above the surface of the earth, so technically a Chinese balloon is not in
their remit. Still, it could have been a chance for the Space Command to set
phasers on stun and show the guys from Peking just who’s boss of American skies.
As for the purported civilian weather balloon, nah; no
one believes that form of camouflage. Lots of nations spy on each other with balloons,
airplanes, fishing boats, and other vessels and devices, all of them said to be
civilian craft for the purpose of plausible deniability. Spies lie; it’s what
they do.
An Air Force fighter shot down the spy balloon and its
gadgetry with a missile said to cost over $400,000. The merry lads in Peking claim to be outraged
about the shootdown but probably they are merely amused. A balloon is low-tech
and probably costs less than a missile, and this one was allowed to float over
North America for days while gathering information. Whether or not it was
effective it was inexpensive, and Uncle Xi enjoyed pulling Uncle Sam’s
whiskers.
The irony is that we all read, heard, and saw the story
on electronic devices made in Shanghai. If the Communists want to know what
we’re talking about they could probably tap a few keys and have the
computerized thermostats in our refrigerators listen in.
And, say, don’t you think the coffee machine has been
acting a little suspiciously lately?
This nation has been attacked, not simply watched,
through the military use of balloons. In 1944-1945 the Japanese launched against
North America thousands of balloons armed with explosives and incendiaries [New Documentary Delves into the Japanese WWII Terror Weapon:
The Fu-Go Balloon Bomb (historynet.com)]. Several thousand of these made landfall and
killed six people and caused some damage. Some of these devices might have failed
and if so a few unexploded bombs remain lost in the woods and mountains of the
American West.
Modern Communists learned history well from the imperial
Japanese of eighty years ago – cobble together a few rudimentary barometric
mechanisms for controlling height through the measured disposal of gasses and
ballast and know the seasonal air currents on the same academic level as a
seventh-grader. Launch. Wait. See.
Now, then, what clever boy or girl in some hostile nation
is up to some unexpected mischief based on lessons learned from the German
Enigma or the British Turing-Welchman Bombe?
-30-
Sunday, February 5, 2023
Assisted Living -poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
“Remarkably Like Any Other Place”
For
Tod
Who
is in assisted living
Assisting
others in living
Rich:
This is an awful place.
More:
Except it’s keeping me from you, my dears, it’s not so bad. Remarkably like any
other place.
Alice:
It drips!
More:
Yes. Too near the river.
-Robert
Bolt, A Man for All Seasons
Life
is a pilgrimage from cell to cell:
The
bedroom of one’s childhood, the college dorm
The
noisy barracks, merry in spite of all
Eighty
conscript soldiers bunked out in rows
The
marriage home set forth among trees and grass
A
comfortable chair with a lamp and books
The
office with its official desks and files
And
Sunday liturgies in an accustomed pew
All
these are now condensed into a cell
Where
God has chosen to live and wait with you
(I suppose I'd better clarify that my friend Tod sees his room as a monastic cell, not a prison cell!)
Friday, February 3, 2023
That Chinese Spy Balloon - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
That
Chinese Spy Balloon
“Number Six is dead. Rover got him.”
-Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner
A spy balloon lurks over Montana
And nobody seems to know what to
do
Against the intruder Top Guns launch
themselves
But only circle around it
piteously
They slink away, intimidated by a
balloon
That takes its pictures and
samples with insolence
Unmenaced by our Merovingian
regime
Generals bemedaled like Russian
doormen
Our leaders stumble over each
other’s gaffes
While in Shanghai the Politburo laughs
MUSICAL TABLES, Billy Collins - a brief review
Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
Musical Tables, Billy Collins: A
White-Space Ripoff
If you purchase this volume as a notebook with a few piquant aphorisms already scribbled here and there on its pages you will have some value for your $26 (now under $20 via Amazon). If you buy it as a volume of poetry you will delight in many of those brief witticisms but as a whole might be disappointed that Mr. Collins and Random House have your money and you have lots of wasted wood pulp.
Thursday, February 2, 2023
El Camino Real de los Tejas - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
El
Camino Real de los Tejas
A WPA highway crumbling in the
sun
Oriented west where dreams disappear
Among the beer cans and the cinder
blocks:
El Camino Real de los Tejas
Sharing a joint, throwing rocks
at snakes
Where the Santa Fe tracks used to
run
Now there’s not even a bus out of
town:
El Camino Real de los Tejas
They don’t even know that they’re
the sons of kings:
In exile along El Camino Real
Appropriating Babushkas from the Orthodox - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Appropriating Babushkas from the
Orthodox
(upon the first
Sunday home from the hospital)
A babushka
badly in need of a hearing aid
Asked me
if I would sub for the missing lector
I
apologetically said I really didn’t feel up to it
And would
she please ask somebody else.
I tracked her
progress back to the narthex by sound:
“HE SAYS
HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T
WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T
WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T
WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!” “HE SAYS HE DON’T WANNA HE’S SICK!”
But it’s all
good; God gives us babushkas
To show us that
the Faith, like the babushkas
Will never go
away
Monday, January 30, 2023
The Senate Protects Us from Evil - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
The Senate Protects Us from Evil
Russian ships creep up upon our coasts
Armed with tsircon missiles to make us ghosts
Police gangs “serve and protect” with beatings and scars
Anonymous in hoodies and unmarked cars
Each self-appointed Grand Inquisitor looks
Through school and public libraries for dirty books
The poor can’t afford to buy meat, bread, and eggs
And so
Congress investigates Taylor Swift’s…tickets
Sunday, January 29, 2023
The Road Not Taken (Or Was It?) - weekly column 1.29.2023
Lawrence Hall, HSG
The Road Not Taken
– Or Was It?
In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)
The
flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This
Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now
far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have
gathered them and will do never again.
-Edward Thomas
Those of us of a certain age (cough) remember the dim, blue-ish
television images of Robert Frost reciting from memory his short poem “The Gift
Outright” at the inauguration of President Kennedy. Because of the wind and the
glaring winter sunlight Frost could not read the poem he had written for the
occasion and so made a quick save with an older one he knew by heart.
“The Gift Outright” would now be condemned as imperialist,
colonialist, and all the other usual “ist” suspects if anyone read poetry at all,
so it’s safe enough. Indeed, in an arc from Mexico City to Ottawa via Washington
the idea of any North American carrying a book is now as unthinkable as
Odysseus carrying the Winnowing Oar as directed by Tiresius.
But it was not always so. For most of history literature was
poetry; prose was for recording facts and shopping lists. When you read through
what is dismissed as Victorian parlour poetry you can see that although the
sentiments are often mawkish the technical skills of ordinary people in their
letters and notebooks are also very highly developed.
The First World War created such a crisis of culture and
a failure of hope that although well-written work continued for a generation as
a sort of existential brenschluss,
poetry after Frost is often little more than self-pitying, self-referential free
verse that connects only with whether or not the writer’s feelings have been
hurt today or if he (the pronoun is gender-neutral) has had a satisfactory
bowel movement lately.
In 1912-1915 Robert Frost’s metaphorical road took him to
England where he hoped to develop a career as a poet. He became great friends
with the successful travel writer, Edward Thomas, who encouraged him and made
some useful introductions that indeed began making Frost famous.
Frost admired Thomas’ descriptive travel essays and encouraged
him to render some of his work as verse.
In 1915 Frost returned to America and Thomas remained in
England undecided as to whether to follow Frost and continue his career in the
U.S.A. or, at 36, to join the British Army.
When Frost published “The Road Not Taken,” Thomas, thinking the poem a
criticism of his well-known indecision in most matters, enlisted, and was
killed in action in 1917.
Indeed, the poem may have been nothing more than a little
joke based on the fact that Frost and Thomas, who loved hiking, often really
did argue about what trail or road they should take.
As for “The Road Not Taken,” it is very much alive and
the subject of badly-written undergraduate essays beginning with the
ever-useless, “In my opinion…”
An acquaintance reminds me that even a very young reader
understands “The Road Not Taken” on levels, but that an older reader, looking back
upon the decisions he has made in life, truly feels it.
Most of the poems of Frost are as fresh and relevant now
as they were in the last century, and worth a re-read without the unholy
inquisition of some tiresome English teacher asking you what a line means when
it’s darned obvious what the line means.
Just don’t read in public; people will stare at you.
-30-
Saturday, January 28, 2023
Corporal Karamazov Flies Home from the War - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Corporal
Karamazov Flies Home from the War
“Which war?”
“Your war – there’s always a war.”
Every young reader sees Alyosha in himself
A sensitive mystic, misunderstood by most
Questing for an answer to a question unasked
Politely shown the door by Father Zosima
As Old Karamazov? Impossible
53 is an age of antiquity
As Dimitri, Ivan, and Smerdyakov?
They are unable to sort out themselves
Lost in thought in a contract airline seat:
A 22-year-old just two days off the line
A patriarchal colonialist ideologue
Friday, January 27, 2023
Memphian Lamentation
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Memphian Lamentation
Let us not point to the blood in the street
As if the murder were somebody else’s fault
As if the narrative belonged on a screen
As if we can be healed with a channel change
Let us instead look within our fatal selves
With every resentment validating the Fall of Man
With every snub murdering Abel again
With every lie sentencing Christ to death
Let us not point to the blood in the street:
A Student Does Not Repose in a Passive State of Being - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
A Student Does Not Repose
in a Passive State of Being
A student is not in a passive state of being
But is rather a soul-probing projectile
Penetrating the wisdom of centuries
And coming out on the other side
Still curious, but a meteor now
Thursday, January 26, 2023
Time is a Falling Leaf (Battery not Included) - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Time is a Falling
Leaf (Battery not Included)
A child and a puppy playing on the lawn
Tumbling through soft grass in the bliss of June
We joy in their celebration of life
Everything is new
Except
that it isn’t
An old man and a dog dozing in a chair
Dreaming of their youth in the bliss of June
We joy in their celebration of life
Everything is old
Except
that it isn’t
Time is a falling leaf
Except
that it isn’t
Tuesday, January 24, 2023
Waiting in a Medical Office Parking Lot on a Stormy Day - short poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Waiting in a Medical
Office Parking Lot on a Stormy Day
Green street signs vibrate in the shifting winds
Oh, gosh, lady, hang on to that little child!
“If this van is rockin’ don’t come a-knockin’”
Okay, but a shiny new Subaru?
Monday, January 23, 2023
Happy Nonsense Rhymes for V.B.
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
Happy Nonsense Rhymes
for V.B.
From an exchange of rhymes on Hellopoetry.com
A tuppence for your hopes and dreams
A florin for flowers for your hair
A sixpence for some seven sunbeams
A half-crown for a comfy fireside chair
Irresponsible Men with Firearms - weekly column 1.22.2023
Lawrence Hall, HSG
And for What?
In
the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, he [Satan]
could find nothing more interesting to think of than his own prestige.
-C. S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, p. 96
Many cultures follow the lunar calendar rather than the
solar, which is interesting and enlightening. In Viet-Nam the lunar new year is
called Tet Nguyen Dan, which means the first day of the new year. Tet is not
only the new lunar year for Vietnamese, it is also the first day of spring and
everyone’s birthday (Tet Holiday: The Age-Old Tradition Explained | Vietcetera).
Good fun for everyone as another strengthening strand in our national tapestry.
Not all who observe the lunar year do so in exactly the
same way, but it is always an occasion for merriment and gratitude.
Unfortunately, there are those who resent parties and
feasts and dances and cookouts and families and friends simply sitting outside on
a summer night talking or playing dominos while the rug-rats chase lightnin’
bugs across the lawn. Each happy custom or tradition, a “ceremony of innocence,”
as Yeats would say, arouses in some unhappy souls resentment instead of joy.
Last weekend a man unhappy with his life chose to take a pistol
and destroy the lives and hopes of innocent people who were dancing the old
year out and the new year in. To paraphrase Lewis, on an evening of light,
love, song, feast, and dance which he could have joined this man focused only
on his own self-pity.
We can’t really know what was in his mind, but we know the
man got angry – okay, let’s make that down-home plain – a man got mad. He left
home with a gun to take his mad out on people. We need to learn the lesson - that
can never end well for anyone. He killed and hurt innocent folks just because
he was mad at… Mad at what? And then he ended
his own life slumped over the steering wheel of a van in a parking lot.
That’s no way to live.
That’s no way to die.
-30-
Friday, January 20, 2023
A Field Guide to Fields - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
A Field Guide to Fields
Watermelons, sunflowers, field corn, sweet corn
Sweet potatoes, green peas, butterbeans, squash
Cabbages, purplehulls, lettuces in rows
And across the fence, red clover in glorious clouds
But the most glorious field is in midsummer hay
Green-dancing beneath the benevolent sun
Crosstracked by beagles, terrapins, foxes, and rabbits
And little boys off to the fishing hole
Those little paths across farm fields, you know
Lead to happy memories of the long-ago
Thursday, January 19, 2023
An Amazon Driver with Skull Earrings - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
An Amazon Driver with
Skull Earrings
No, of course he’s not an Amazon; he’s a man
Navigating a big ol’ delivery truck through life
Ferrying to addresses this side of the Styx
Brown pasteboard boxes and white plastic envelopes
I wanted to ask him about his goal in life
But he was in a hurry to turn around
And continue his rowing, so I thanked him
And he thanked me, and I don’t know his dream
A man with skull earrings and muscled arms -
I hope he’s steering toward a happier shore
Sunday, January 15, 2023
When the Farmer's Daughter was Late for School - poem
Lawrence Hall
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com
Logosophiamag.com
Hellopoetry.com
Fellowshipandfairydust.com
When the Farmer’s
Daughter was Late for School
She was a petite and delicate child
And studious, her work among the best
Beloved of her classmates for her demeanor mild
And all of us who knew her felt ourselves blessed
One day she was late, which had never happened before
There was ‘flu going ‘round – had she caught a chill?
Breathlessly she appeared at the classroom door
I was worried, and asked if she were ill
She smiled most sweetly, and shook her curly head:
“We been busy castratin’ hawgs,” she said
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