The Cold Has Gotten Old - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Cold Has Gotten Old

 

 

  For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snow-storms...

 

-Thoreau, Walden

 

 

The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees

And little lights in all their vestmental tints

No longer counterpoint the dark northern breeze

No visions of spring, no dreamings, no hints

 

The happy lawns of summer are mud and frost

The path to the cowshed is a rattle of sleet

The trail to the fishing hole was yesterday lost

And our boots are too thin for our freezing feet

 

But after our chores boiling hot coffee, please -

The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees!

Nothing You Write is Confidential - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Your Poem’s Background Check

 

And above all, who is in power in that part of the country,

or, rather, who will be by the time we get there?

 

-Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

We don’t suffer a Soviet Writers’ Union

Except that we do – and what are you up to?

Have you written an ordinary adjective

That will be forbidden in a future place?

          You sound suspiciously colonialist

 

Last year DEI was mandatory

This year it will be a forbidden scheme

What guidelines for little magazines

Will be cleansed in the New Order to come?

          Harriet Monroe is a non-person now

 

Who will be in charge of your poetry and your life

Whenever you don’t get to wherever it was 

          that you were going?

Your Changes Have Been Made - poem

 The transfer has botched the formatting. Please accept this as is.

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

Your Changes Have Been Saved

 

 

Noticed the passive voice              the passive voice is to be noticed

 

You did not make changes             changes were not made by you

                                                       but changes were made

 

You did not save changes                 changes were not saved by you

                                                          but changes were saved

 

If you were relevant you might have been consulted

Imagine There's No "Imagine" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Imagine There’s No “Imagine”

“Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”

-G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man

Imagine a world without anthems that whine

It’s difficult if we try; the ‘seventies cry

Rockabilly tunes in the communion line

And fling fluorescents from a dropped-ceiling sky

 

The ‘seventies tell the Bible what to say

And dangling speakers program us with a primitive beat

Manifestos proclaim the ideology of the day

The Gospel is reduced to an electronic tweet

 

But, peace! 

 

The tie-dyed ‘seventies still croak and wail

But it is the Eternal that will prevail

 

12 January 2025

Stand-To for Night Patrol - short poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Stand-To for Night Patrol

 

 

The Americans were said to believe that the Communists are on the defensive…

 

-New York Times, 11 January 1970

 

I keep seeing a boat’s black silhouette

Upon the red water, against the red sky

And the black-death tree-line along the shore

A dark, decaying scene, and I don’t know why

There is More Than One Book - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

There is More Than One Book

 

A civilization writes and reads its books

As poetry, pictures, prose, and glorious song

Of war and work and love and peaceful fields

Scholarship and courage and a people’s arts

 

But when unhappy men with an unhappy god

Maintain that their one book is all we’ll need

In submission to build an empire of death

The threat is clear: their god doesn’t want us

 

Reading and writing are civilization

From the very beginning of Creation

52 Hebrew Words - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

52 Hebrew Words

 

Max gave me a book: 52 Hebrew Words

For Christmas

Appreciate the irony that isn’t there –

If Judaism isn’t real, then neither are we

 

Words in Hebrew seem to be topped as flames

As Light - the light as truth, the light for truth

As flame for sacrifice, as flame for peace

As Torah unrolled, all Creation unrolled

 

Everything begins with a word, the Word

Today we will begin with Shema – Hear

 

With gratitude

 

 

52 Hebrew Words. Dave Adamson. Christian Art Gifts: Bloomington

Reading the Room - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Reading the Room

 

I don’t know to read a room, but look –

I’m still pretty good at reading a book

A Colonial project - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a victim of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a perpetrator of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Am I a victim of

 

A Colonial Project

 

Or is it

 

THE Colonial Project

 

And whose?

 

I think I’ll make a pot of tea

 

If that’s not too colonial for anyone

 

And would you like a cup?

 

May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland

 

Man arrested entering the Capitol with a machete and three knives

 

-U. K. Daily Mail

 

 

No weapons in the Capitol; it’s a rule

The adults who work there must be safely bubbled

But when some pimply oaf brings a gun to school

No one in D.C. seems especially troubled

I am a Ptolemaic - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

I am a Ptolemaic

 

 

There was a star danced, and under that I was born

 

-Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, II.i.349

 

 

This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got

Our Narnia, our Middle-Earth; it’s green

It’s green and blue and round, an almost-sphere

Fitted with all the ancient conveniences

 

Let the stars encircle us as a crown

And who will dare to say it is not so?

For we are commanded to grow this garden

By the light of the sun, and of faith and love

 

As Shakespeare might have said, this blessed plot -

This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got

"LA Fires Bring Art to a Halt" - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

“LA Fires Bring Art to a Halt”

 

Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art and Its Discontents

 

No.

 

A fire brings nothing to a halt

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives -

 

A poet abandoning her car to flee for her life

Holds to her heart her notebooks in grocery-store bag

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A trumpeter manages to save the mouthpiece at least

While carrying his child out to an ambulance

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A sculptor’s eyes record a wall of windows

To be re-molded as life-filled windows of dreams

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

Firefighters wrestling a hose through smoke and heat

Are a choreograph of life against flaming death

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

An artist whose studio is now but smoke

Will stir ashes and water, and paint again

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

A little girl will write of her little dog

Her bestest pal whom she never saw again

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

In a shelter tonight an aging man

Will sing to himself the love songs of his youth

 

To the last respiration of the very last soul

And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

 

 

 

                                   then patch

 

a few words together and don’t try

to make them elaborate, this isn’t

a contest but the doorway

 

-Mary Oliver, “Praying”

“Now, Therefore, Write for Yourselves This Song” - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

“Now, Therefore, Write for Yourselves This Song” 

 

 

-Deuteronomy 31:19 per Talmud at My Jewish Learning <community@mail.myjewishlearning.com>

 

 

“Nunc itaque scribite vobis canticum istud.”

 

-Douay-Rheims

 

 

What song will you write for the people of God?

Something from the Prophets or the Laws

A hymn for Mary, dancing in the spring

Or maybe praise for patient and protective Joseph

 

What song will you write for your own true love?

Gentle rhyming for the music of her gentle laugh

Iambics and meters her intellect to please

Birdsong sweet to limn her holiness

 

What song will you write for the world God made?

Matins for mist and mountain and flowered glade

Epiphany Moved and Improved – The Magi Must Re-Schedule Their Arrival Time

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Epiphany Moved and Improved –

The Magi Must Re-Schedule Their Arrival Time

 

Whatever committee decides these things

Has chosen to shift ancient feasts about

For the convenience of the modern world

In scheduling meetings and interviews

 

Magi following a smart watch in the sky

The ostler wants the stable cleared by ten

King Herod tapping massacres on an app

Plough Monday must be reset to Tuesday next

 

Whatever committee decides these things

Is stricken deaf when the sacring bell rings

Why Do They Say He was Tragically Murdered? - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Why Do They Say He was Tragically Murdered?

 

Was anyone ever joyfully murdered?

Happily murdered?

Humorously murdered?

Gloriously murdered?

 

When at dusk a mist begins to rise

A sinister mist from across the fields

And you seem to perceive a malevolent being

Peering at you from the tree line dark

 

Yes, something is watching you

 

It is not God-banished Grendel from Beowulf

Nor is it Nesferatu creeping up to you

Or a Haunt arising from a long-lost grave

It is something even more grotesque and obscene:

 

                                            An Adverb

The Presumption in Wake-Up Calls - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Presumption in Wake-Up Calls

 

A wake-up call is but a manifesto

Retro 1968 but less literate

Demanding that the world pay attention

To the temper-tantrums of some middle-aged guy

 

Who knows all about guns ‘n’ bombs ‘n’ stuff

While the rest of us know all about raising our kids

Working 12-hour shifts, paying our bills

Building our lives, and taking care of each other

 

The rest of us have grown-up things to do

    The presumptuous waker-upper

Should ditch his childish ego and wake up himself

Activate Your Card Now! It's Easy! - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Activate Your Card Now! It’s Easy!

 

‘Enry ‘Iggins, Tiffany in Calcutta, and my Cousins Down the Road

 

There even are places where English completely disappears -

Why, in America they haven't used it for years!

 

-Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady

 

California and council flats, aye, there’s the nexus

Great Britain taught the world English right and proper

But in hearing my cousins from Caney Head, Texas

I conclude that the Empire has come a cropper!

The Unit Not Labeled for Retail Sale - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

This Unit Not Labeled for Retail Sale

 

You can’t break me apart, she said to me

This unit is not labeled for retail sale

And if you think that you like what you see

You can post your money for the emotional bail

 

A Christmas candy said “The Unit Not Labeled for Retail Sale” so I had a little fun with that.

The Stray 'Possum Cafe - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

The Stray ‘Possum Café

 

The only comparisons in Western literature might be with the Romantics or the Beat Generation, but the Russian Silver Age poets outdazzled them in glamour and intrigue.

 

-Darran Anderson

 

 

We lay our scene not in Saint Petersburg

Where Anna Ahkmatova flirted and rhymed

With Gumilyov, Mandelstam, and Tsvetaeva

Among champagne, cigarettes, tears, and pearls

 

In the old and storied Stray Dog Café 

But in a field on a December night

Where two opossums meet in quest of love

And wrangle in the leaves of intimacy

 

Poor strays making…art…without any fear

Of execution by the Kremlin Mountaineer

 

 

Saint Petersburg’s Stray Dog Café was a matrix for art, music, dance, and poetry from imperial Russia to the Soviet horror, and thence into the world.  It almost serves as a sort of hinge between the 19^th century and the 20^th. Please read Darran Anderson’s professional and thus accessible article in City Journal: Anna Akhmatova’s Bravery.

 

I am having fun with intruding ‘possums among the Silver Age poets, but as for them, yes, they are essential. Their brilliance still shines for us and influences what we write even if we are unaware of them – and for that most of them were murdered by the mad tyranny of Communism.

So This is the New Year - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

So This is the New Year

 

 

The road goes ever on and on…

 

-from at least three variations of a song in The Lord of the Rings

 

 

About this new year – it doesn’t look so new

A metaphorical kick of the tires suggests

It’s been down many roads before

But then, so have we

 

About this new year – it doesn’t look so new

But the first sunlight in the bare oak trees

And upon last summer’s ground-shoaling leaves

Lead me to pull on my boots and step outside

 

Frost, sky, sunlight, cardinals, squirrels, life

About this new year – it looks pretty good now