Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Ode to a Monitor Lizard
I saw a picture of a monitor lizard
Its skin is scaley and its tongue is scissored
I’d back away from that wrinkly old wizard -
I don’t want to be ground up in its gizzard!
Sunday, August 24, 2025
Ode to a Monitor Lizard - rhyming doggerel
Making Peace with Apple ICloud - poem (of a sort)
"I Pray You, Remember the Porter" a poem about a sort-of retirement
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
“I Pray You, Remember the Porter”
-Macbeth II.ii.20-21
When I was a young husband and father
I served: on the parish council, taught CCD
Chaperoned bake sales, CYO, and youth trips
Eucharistic minister, lector, and greeter
(No one else could hand out a leaflet with such grace, such elegance, such panache!)
But with age, and one by one, I let them go
This morning I asked to be recused at last
From thirty years on the lector duty list
“God’s benison go with you…”
As lector
I lost confidence in sorting out the new ways of doing things
Of being where I’m supposed to be
And moving when I’m supposed to do so
And moving where I’m supposed to do so
Carrying the lectionary without dropping it
Mounting the Altar steps without tripping
Standing in one place for more than a few minutes
Seeing the words clearly (why is the print so small?)
Wreathing the verbs without thripping over my thongue
But I’m still a greeter – I can open the door
‘Tis my appointed skill level, but ‘tis one
As Macduff did not say
No leaflets, though; that stuff’s now on the InterGossip
I smile and open the door, admire babies, help with coats
Show visitors the way to the euphemism
Tell the kids how tall they’ve grown
(You’re a senior!? Why, I remember when…)
And it’s okay.
I am blessed with honor, love, and troops of friends
(as Macbeth could not say)
Honor, love, and troops of friends
All good.
Deo gratias
Saturday, August 23, 2025
When Alliteration and Peter Piper Go Bad - nonsense
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
When Alliteration Goes Bad
Peter
Piper
Picked
a
Peck
of
Pickled
Hamsters
Friday, August 22, 2025
To a True Believer: When I.C.E. Runs Out of Immigrants - quatrain
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
To a True Believer: When I.C.E. Runs out of Immigrants
Many genuine Bolsheviks who were arrested at that time utterly refused to believe that this had happened with (Stalin’s) knowledge, still less on his personal instructions.
-Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, p. 17
When your steel sleeping shelf is next to mine
Three or four racks high under lock and key
You will cry out again in your petulant whine:
“But I voted for him!
This was not supposed to happen to ME!”
Thursday, August 21, 2025
“I Pray You, Remember the Porter” - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
“I Pray You, Remember
the Porter”
-Macbeth
II.ii.20-21
When I was a young husband and father
I served: on the parish council, taught CCD
Chaperoned bake sales, CYO, and youth trips
Eucharistic minister, lector, and greeter
(No one else could hand out a leaflet with such grace, such elegance, such panache)
But with age, and one by one, I let them go
This morning I asked to be recused at last
From thirty years on the lector duty list
“God’s benison go with you…”
As lector
I lost confidence in sorting out the new ways of doing
things
Of being where I’m supposed to be
And moving when I’m supposed to do so
And moving where I’m supposed to do so
Carrying the lectionary without dropping it
Mounting the Altar steps without tripping
Standing in one place for more than a few minutes
Seeing the words clearly (why is
the print so small?)
Wreathing the verbs without thripping over my thongue
But I’m still a greeter – I can open the door
‘Tis my appointed skill level, but ‘tis one
As Macduff did not say
No leaflets, though; that stuff’s now on the InterGossip
I smile and open the door, admire babies, help with coats
Show visitors the way to the euphemism
Tell the kids how tall they’ve grown
(You’re a senior!? Why, I remember when…)
And it’s okay.
I am blessed with honour, love, and troops of friends
(as Macbeth
could not say)
Honour, love, and troops of friends
All good.
Deo gratias
America Inspires the Free World - couplet
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
America Inspires the Free World
Americans are a people who, when threatened by a tyrant
Watch TV to applaud someone for cooking an omelet
An Exercise in Alliteration Cut Short by the August Heat - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
An Exercise in Alliteration
Cut Short by the August Heat
Even summer seems weary with summer:
Withering weeds wish woefully for winter
High heat hangs heavily upon the heath
While garden groundlings gasp across the grass
Resettlement to the East on Kristi's Personal Prisoner Airline - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
“Resettlement to the East”
Kristi Noem is pushing for ICE to buy and operate a fleet of deportation planes, sources say
Drain the swamp for a better America
On Qatari Boeings detailed in gold
With interiors by Hugo Boss
Saturday, August 16, 2025
Dust Devils on a Sunday Morning in August - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Dust Devils on a Sunday Morning in
August
The Road to Emmaus is asphalt now
Instead of dust devils spinning in the heat
The stench of curious chemicals flow
In shimmerings among the hovering oaks
Above the crisping-brown fields circling vultures
Seem focused on me – do they sense a decaying soul?
My great-grandfather drove a wagon to church
I have air-conditioning, and Chopin on the radio
The Road to Emmaus is asphalt now
But you still might meet a Stranger along the way
A Bronze Plaque Commemorating the Trump-Putin Summit at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
A Bronze Plaque
Commemorating the Trump-Putin Summit
at Joint Base
Elmendorf-Richardson
On this spot on the
15th of August 2025
Nothing happened
The Shroud of Turin is True Again Today! Or Maybe Not! - doggerel having fun with the U. K. DAILY MAIL
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
The Shroud of Turin is True Again
Today! Or Maybe Not!
The ghost of Amelia
Earhart speaks
The U.K.
Daily Mail examined the Shroud of Turin
And found
Amelia Earhart wrapped up inside:
“Hey! This is
my shroud for private buryin’!
So don’t just
stand there, all goofy and bug-eyed!”
“You keep
changing the place where you found my plane
And yesterday
you said the Shroud of Turin is bogus
Today you say
it’s real – you babble in vain
The ghost of
me wishes you would find a focus”
The U.K.
Daily Mail found Amelia Earhart’s plane –
Tomorrow
they’ll be sure to lose it again
Thursday, August 14, 2025
Our Little Universities - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Our Little Universities
From an idea by Nivek
Many books are little universities
Complete with faculties and study halls
Grassy lawns on which to argue ideas
Syllabi written from your heart and mind
Laboratories of the mind for distilling wisdom
A concert hall of happy voices in song
“Pomes All Sizes” spoken from the heart
And maybe a Rain Tree on your walk to class
The Brothers Karamazov as a prayer book
300 Tang Poems with the wisdom of China
The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Q
(Not THAT Q!)
Doctor Zhivago in squabbling translations
And some have spoken most eloquently
for Goodnight Moon
And now what university of yours helps sing
the world in tune?
Wednesday, August 13, 2025
Let’s All Meet in Cicely - sonnet
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Let’s All Meet in
Cicely
From an idea flown all the way from Thailand
Let’s all meet in Cicely before the snow
You can find me sitting outside The Brick
At peace as the gentle autumn breezes blow
Having put aside my hiking stick
Fleischmann joins us on that old wooden bench
Chris-in-the-Morning stops by for a beer
Hollings gives Shelly a husbandly pinch
She takes his broom and with it smacks his rear
Maurice and Maggie, Ruth-Anne, Marilyn, and Ed
Drop in with stories of love and life and history
And news brought in by plane and road and sled
To this Brigadoon of happy mystery
Let’s all meet in Cicely before the snow
And share in its peace before we go
Never Begin a Poem with “I” - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Never Begin a Poem with “I”
I suppose I have been commanded to write
These fragile words in attempted iambs
Which few will ever read or ever want to read
But then – you are reading them
Thank you
You've Read Your Last Free Article - not exactly a poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
You’ve Read Your Last
Free Article
Yes, I have.
(Click. Delete.)
Monday, August 11, 2025
Leave It To Beaver - The Shakespearean I.C.E. Episode - pastiche and doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Leave it to Beaver – The Shakespearean I.C.E. Episode
Dramatis Personae:
Ward, a husband and father
Wally, Ward’s teenaged son
June, Ward’s wife, accomplishing hussefery in a dress and pearls
Beaver, Ward and June’s younger son
Ward:
Wally, I knowest thou hath merry plans for the morrow
But I must tell thee, to thy woe and sorrow
That thou’rt to stay home, and mow the lawn
Wally:
Oh, golly, gee, seest thou my face turn wan?
Beloved father, I cannot with thy orders comport
For I cannot find my comradely passport
Nor, in addition to that paperwork dearth,
Yea, verily, my certificate of birth!
Without which workers are subject to arrest
By I.C.E., as the news and warnings attest
June:
‘Tis true – I.C.E. feareth every gangbanger and yob
But they will imprison some kid at his job
And Superman might get thee; I.C.E. hired him today
That is his new truth, justice, and th’American way
Beaver:
Gee, Wally, if thou’rt carried to Alcatraz
Can I have thy room?
Voice Off:
We needeth no stinkin’ warrants!
Exeunt omnes, pursued by Dogberries with guns
Sunday, August 10, 2025
Disturbances in Church - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Disturbances in Church
The more I am
disturbed by liturgical novelties
The less I am
disturbed by God
The less I am
disturbed by liturgical novelties
The more I am
disturbed by God
All of which
is logical, not odd
Saturday, August 9, 2025
Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening - shallow rhyming doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening
From an idea by a friend in Thailand
Whose Deconstructionist Narrative this is I think I know
Their (because we mustn’t say “her” or “his”)
New Criticism is on their podcast, though
They will not see me applying Phenomenology here
To help fill up their woods with Neo-Post-Colonialist blow
My little solar car must think it other-gendered
To pause while I Conceptualize without a Starbuck’s near
Between Foucault and Derrida here
Next to the Sapir-Whorf Theory, and without a beer
They give their location transponder a Derrida shake
To demand a formal apology for this cultural mistake
The only other sound’s the Existential creep
Of Masonic Catholic Nazi Zionism on the take
Judgmental stereotypes are flying, shallow and cheap
But I have an Inner Reality to keep
And an Intertextual Analysis of Post-Structuralism to steep
And an Aesthetic Objectification of Dialectics to steep
Friday, August 8, 2025
As You Sometimes Remind Me - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
As You Sometimes Remind Me
One day I'll suddenly
recall:
The sun exists!
-Pasternak, “About
These Poems”1
When the
world focuses on a sheet of paper
In a little
room where hopes have come to die
The pen can’t
write out a prescription for life
Or limn the
remedies for a fallen world
We begin our
days as did Pasternak
A cup of tea against
the fear, the fear
Unsure of the
conflicting daily edicts
The babblings
about ballrooms, tariffs, and arrests
Pasternak
opened a window to light and fair
And to the
children playing in the snow he cried,
“My dears, what
century is it outside?”
1Translations vary
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