Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Third Sunday in Extraordinary Time
Dear friends in Christ,
The divine liturgy will be delayed for a few minutes
While the new regime checks everyone’s papers
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Third Sunday in Extraordinary Time - very short
Monday, January 20, 2025
Tiny Artists of the Night - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Tiny Artists of
the Night
Snowflakes by flashlight in the deepening dark
I left them to their night of proper tasks
They beamed down to the earth all over the park
And for the cold grey dawn they’ve made great masks
Plateaus of iridescent white to layer the lawn
Transcendent beauty in a transient medium
Still falling against the feeble all-day dawn
Little artists who form great truths from tedium
And then mysteriously they fly away
To shape the existentials some other day
The Dignity of the Office - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
The Dignity of the Office
Whatever the incoming president fancies
(One hopes to speak without fear of libel)
Ageing (entertainers) in chancy pantsies
And will he take his oaf on a Village People Bible?
20 January 2025
Sunday, January 19, 2025
The White House Inaugural Banquet and the Idle Dishwashing Machine - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
The White House Inaugural
Banquet
and the Idle
Dishwashing Machine
Henry
II: Fork?
Becket: It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves you
dirtying your fingers.
Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.
Becket: Yes, but it's washable.
Henry II: So are your fingers. I don't see the
point.
-Becket
(1964)
The White House dishwashing machine is idle, kids
Our leaders grub with fingers for their food
Cardboarded burgers as greasy pyramids
On mahogany Queen Anne tables strewed
The sycophants kiss their effendi’s (ring)
And fall to feeding at his soigne trough
No waiters are needed to pour and pass
The diners chortle and chew and choke and cough
The White House dishwashing machine is idle, guys
(Dessert is Velveeta oozing over French fries)
Comment is Freed
From:samf@substack.com
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Saturday, January 18, 2025
The Holy Bible as a Base for a Potted Plant - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
The Holy Bible as a Base for a Potted Plant
On a little shelf in our local pharmacy
A somewhat tattered Bible has reposed for years
And on that Bible is positioned a potted plant
And above them on the wall a cowboy cartoon
The iconography is elusive to me
One seeks for meaning in an assemblage:
So why this thing in this place at this time?
Existentially speaking (as we said in the ‘60s)
Why?
A curious piece of iconography
On a little shelf in our local pharmacy
Dag Hammarskjold Negotiates with Himself and with God - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Dag Hammarskjold Negotiates
with Himself and with God
Cf. Auden’s introduction to Vagmarken
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our
destiny
but what we put into it is ours.
Vagmarken (Markings),
p. 55 in the 1965 Knopf edition
When you were a little child
If you attend a school named for Dag Hammarskjold
How long did it take you to learn to spell his name?
And you are now an adult
And blessed with Hammarskjold’s Vagmarken
How long did it take you to joy in his transcendent good?
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Binding Each Word with a Prayer - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Binding Each Word with an Incantation, a Charm, a Spell
You. Not a generalized out-there “you” but – YOU
Gentle Writer
A mysterious thought is dream’ed unto you
Or a conclusion sails from your observant mind
You take a pen of goose-quill carefully carved
You dip it into a horn or pottle of ink
Not a metaphorical inkhorn of floridity
But the horn of a beast, hollowed out
Stoppered with a fitted wooden plug
And charged with ink of a curious blue
Of minerals or dyes or the juice of berries boiled
And worked with pagan spells or Christian prayers
You take an expensive page of animal-skin
Worked out with scrapings and scrubbings and acids
Or perhaps imported sheets of Egyptian papyrus
(Against which some of the younger brethren sneer)
Remember the annual budget! Be careful, now!
Paper doesn’t grow on trees, you know!
(Well, you could argue about the papyrus)
You set the light just right, the sun or a lamp
The Altar is where candles glow in honor of Our Lord
(And then there’s the budget; candles are expensive)
So you must work with the sun or a tallow lamp
At a writing slope angled as the amarius says
You think a thought
You lift your pen
With a prayer upon it
You guide it down
You write a word
A word
Each word is magic
What did you write?
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Front Toward Enemy - very short free verse poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Front Toward Enemy
If
In what we may laughingly call real life
You can read those three words
You’re in the wrong place
‘Bye-‘bye
The Cold Has Gotten Old - poem
Lawrence Hall
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!
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Nothing You Write is Confidential - poem
Lawrence Hall
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?
Monday, January 13, 2025
Your Changes Have Been Made - poem
The transfer has botched the formatting. Please accept this as is.
Lawrence Hall
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
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
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
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
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
Friday, January 10, 2025
Reading the Room - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
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
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?
Thursday, January 9, 2025
May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
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
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
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”
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