Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Do Dreams Fade Away at Dawn? Or Do We?
Do dreams beyond the dreamer dream
The imagined lands from deepest night
In which we live and seem to love -
Do they exist at morning’s light?
Saturday, February 1, 2025
Do Dreams Fade Away at Dawn? Or Do We? - short poem
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Constitution to Save It - poem
Lawrence
Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Constitution to Save It
-as an unnamed army major in Viet-Nam did not say
When old Rip Van Me wakes up each morning he finds
A world
unlike the one when his nap began -
Who are these
angry faces on great screens?
Why are there
cracks in the Capitol dome?
Arrests and
deportations, mobs with clench’ed fists
Grim armored vehicles
patrolling our city streets
A presidential
advisor hurling Nazi salutes
Personal
loyalty checks within our surveillance state
When old Rip
Van Me wakes up each morning he finds
A nation of
madmen who have lost their minds
Thursday, January 30, 2025
Flight 5342 - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Happy Young Lives Rich with Promise
“I will go in to the Altar of God”
Ephemera among the searchlight beams:
A paperback novel, a Mickey Mouse doll
Purses and ‘phones, and in-flight magazines
Briefcases still securing important work
Ephemera among the searchlight beams:
A note about souvenirs for the kids back home
From the Folger and the aerospace museum
Ice skates in the bins, safely stowed away
But now
Now lost to us among the searchlight beams:
Happy young lives rich with promises and dreams
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
Cancelling the InterGossip Service - not exactly a poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Cancelling the
InterGossip Service
And how are you today I am so very glad to hear that thank
you sir you have paid today so we won’t be able to cancel the service until next
month I am so glad to hear that we need a mailing address so that we can send
you a box for the equipment thank you sir no a post office box won’t do I am
sorry sir you are breaking up yes sir let me read that back to you thank you
sir let me verify your account number that is correct and thank you I will need
your zip code will you repeat that thank you but our records show that your
service address is oh that is not it please tell me again thank you sir I will
read it back to you thank you sir you will have thirty days from the
twenty-seventh of next month to return the equipment in the box we will provide
to you at your mailing address and I have that mailing address so thank you sir
if you will wait two minutes while I access your file thank you sir and I will
need your mailing address oh I see I have that sir for the equipment return
thank you sir which will cost you $350 if it is not returned thank you sir and
now I must read you this list now if you have any questions if you will please
wait two minutes thank you sir and may I ask why you are discontinuing service
and are you moving sir if you will wait two minutes while I update your records
thank you sir and I have your mailing address and may I ask why you are
discontinuing service with us oh I am so sorry sir but did they tell you it is
fibre optic I understand sir before we go I want to advise you that because you
are a long-time customer we have a special offer thank you sir I am happy to
have helped you sir and I hope you have a good rest of the day
Guarding Borders Against Criminals - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Guarding Borders Against Criminals
In any case we are not attacking them at all. We are offering them incalculable benefits.
― T.H. White, The Once and Future King
They began settling here a long time ago
At first they were welcome, but they developed a ‘tude
We need their charity - they tell us so!
But their intentions are obvious and crude
With insolence, edict, and a heavy political hand
They’ve come to save us from ourselves; that’s what they say
Here in our beloved Canada, our home and native land –
Oh, won’t the Americans just go away!
A Corporal Who Would Never Be a Sergeant - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
A Corporal Who Would Never Be a Sergeant
He was a corporal who would never be a sergeant
In a Palmach squad that would never be recognized
By the Palmach or by the Haganah.
He was a rabbi of the rocks and rubble and roads
He would never be recognized as a rabbi
He loved a curly-haired girl who would never marry him
And was friends with a little feral dog
Who crept out to him from behind the ruins
There was blood that called to him from Poland
In Yiddish and Hebrew; he didn’t remember why
He was a luftmensch, but dependable in his way
A littleness never admitted to staff meetings
He did what he was told to do, and then ignored
He delivered messages and curious packages
To obscure points forbidden to him and his kind
And the dog was shot dead for someone’s sport
With an old British rifle he cleared strongpoints
So that the officers could add to their resumes’
And he was told by the cooks that he was too late
As they laughed and closed the door on him
Confusion and smoke, and fighting in the streets
Burning corpses and armored cars, wild screams
There was little of him after the RPG hit
And children scurried out to mutilate and steal
He was posted as missing, possibly a deserter
Monday, January 27, 2025
Late January is a Time of Grey - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Late January is a Time of Grey
I read a little in Billy
Collins just now
Because Tolkien is in the
other room
Along with the laundry and an
unmade bed
Late January is a time of
grey
I just want to sit with my
coffee awhile
And then I’ll stow the
laundry and make the bed
The dishwasher can remain
silent until tomorrow
Late
January is a time of grey
I was nibbled to death by
ducks today
Because
Late January is a time of
grey
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Third Sunday in Extraordinary Time - very short
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
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
To:mhall46184@aol.com
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
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