A Sidewalk Table at Pouline's - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Sidewalk Table at Pouline’s

 

V: Monsieur…

 

R:                     Oui?

 

V:                              Your life has no meaning

 

Please let it have no meaning somewhere else

 

R: But my coffee, my croissant…

 

V:                                                    Oui, you have paid

 

And have left the perfect tip. The afternoon

 

Is slow and there are certainly plenty of tables

 

Your appearance and demeanor are parfait but…”

 

R: Oui?

 

V:             You have sat here ten minutes into the time

 

At which you commenced to appear desperate.

 

R: But how?

 

V:                If you must ask then you are desperate

You have not been accepted into the mysteries

And never can be. You have been caught out

Please dispose of your Mont Blanc pen

 

Your embossed note cards, your important papers,

And your leather portfolio crafted in understated elegance,

And go deliver groceries or wash cars.

 

R: Does it really show?

 

V:                It’s as if you

Were taking a selfie

At Shakespeare & Co

 

R: Then all is existential despair

 

V:                Oui, former monsieur

Tell Me About Your Day - poem

  

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Tell Me About Your Day

 

The evening air is cool – let’s sit outside in the dusk

Tell me about your day, your work, your friends

I like your friends; they write such lovely verse -

Nothing as nearly good as yours, of course!

 

The evening air is cool

 

I enjoyed breakfast with my friends, our weekly outing

We talked of our children and our hopes for them

Later I worked at chores in the garden and house

And read new lines from my favorite poet

 

The evening air is cool

 

I so enjoy talking with you – do I talk too much?

Too little? Just right? You are such fun to listen to!

 

And the evening air is just right

So I Got to Pike's Peak... - short poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Some Adventure!

 

I saw the sunrise glory of Pike’s Peak

From the window of a car, for I was weak –

While morning freed the mountain from fog and gloom

I mostly saw the fluorescents in the emergency room!

 

(Many thanks to Dr. Lam and the other kind and considerate professionals, including the helpful security guard, at UC Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs)

Your Heart as a Tabernacle - short poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Your Heart as a Tabernacle

 

From an idea by Blue Sapphire

 

The heart is a tabernacle upon the Altar

Within it reposes our hopes and dreams

We open it as sacrament, as sacrifice

A gift that in the end is given back to us

Lady Macbeth and a Luna Moth - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Lady Macbeth and a Luna Moth

 

A luna moth is elegant in her green

Like Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth

Beautiful and yet somehow sinister

Those wing’ed eyes – they seem to look at us

 

Eyes

 

That measure us for a dagger or a cup

She clings to a lichened brick wall at night

Wings pulsing against that wall, waiting, waiting…

Suddenly wild flutterings as she flees into the dark!

 

Exit, pursued by a cat

Jesus and a Reference to Fowler's Modern English Usage - doggerel

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Jesus and a Reference to Fowler’s Modern English Usage

 

“But who do you say that I am?”

 

“Whom!” boomed a voice from the back of the room

 

And St. Peter asked of him

 

“A community college graduate, I presume?”

(This is from an old joke by C. S. Lewis or in a book about him: "'Whom,' he said, for he had been to night school.")

I am not God - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

I am not God

 

About final judgement

Just give it a rest -

God does salvation

We do our best

An Unhappy O. Henry Ending - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

An Unhappy O. Henry Ending

 

His picture is on the telescreen tonight

Stepping onto a twin-engine executive jet

Then posed in an easy-street seat in the back

Uniformed crew, someone to bring him a snack

 

The same smug grin he had when he dropped out of school

“I’m tired of this nowhere town,” he sneered

“I’m gonna go somewhere and get me a life;

I don’t need you or any of this mess”

 

And life is what he got, and a suit in orange

And a free ride home to his nowhere town

For my Mother's Funeral - couplet

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

For my Mother’s Funeral

 

For my mother’s funeral

I did not sell souvenir tees

Never Carry a Rifle - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Never Carry a Rifle

 

Never carry a rifle

For a man

Who never carried a rifle

Everyone Has Advice for Writers - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Everyone Has Advice for Writers

There is a man…hangs odes upon hawthorns and elegies on brambles…

-As You Like It, III.ii.377-380

 

Who is your target audience, they ask

 

A pair of clevers on the telescreen

Giving their audience suggestions for publication

Ideas for making it on the writing scene:

“Target audience” is their incantation

 

Who is your target audience?

 

Is your target moving or stationary?

A paper bullseye or something edible

An enemy, a thing, an adversary

A carnivore’s luncheon spreadable?

 

Who is your target audience?

 

But a reader is not a target

She is not the object of your life -

                                      She is the subject of her own

 

Respect your reader

 

Respect

The Leaker Demands Informers - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

The Leaker Demands Informers

 

Why do people inform on others—including neighbors, family members, co-workers, friends, lovers…in repressive societies?

 

-Informers: secrets, truths, and dignity | OUPblog

 

Franklin asked: what good shall I do today?

But the current regime demands that you betray -

Whom shall I report to the State today?

Red Spider Lilies in Autumn - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Red Spider Lilies

 

For Max

 

Who Magicked Autumn in with the Spider Lilies

 

Red spider lilies – we were speaking of them

And why somehow they hadn’t yet appeared

To call the oak leaves down upon the lawn

To dance among their equinoctial blooms

 

Red spider lilies – suddenly they are here!

Perhaps they only waited to be invited

We spoke, and they arose, laughing at us

And waving happily in the afternoon breeze

 

Red spider lilies – now autumn has begun

In late September’s glowing tawny sun

The Brass-Elevator Mountaineer, Poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

 

The Brass-Elevator Mountaineer

 

A weak imitation of

Osip Mandelstam

For whom we pray, “Memory eternal”

 

 

Our lives no longer sense truth around them

In our ewails we are afraid of each other’s words

 

But whenever there’s an eye-rolled whisper

It’s about the brass-elevator mountaineer

 

The ten tiny worms of his fingers

His words like mountains of loot

 

The waving tendrils atop his head

The glitter of his shiny Tesla

 

Wheels stained with a scum of groveling bosses

He toys with the tributes of his house pets:

 

One clenches his fisties

Another salutes

A third pledges eternal loyalty

 

He pokes out his fingers and grabs ‘em by their _______

 

He magic-markers mass deportations:

Three hundred or more for El Salvador

A hundred or so for Guantanamo

Uncounted hundreds to disappear

From routine check-ins here

 

“Your search has returned zero (0) matching records”

 

He rolls the possibilities of ____ __________ on his tongue like diet

     sodas

He wishes he could deport his former best friends forever

 

Our lives no longer sense truth around them

That To-Go Coffee Ain't Goin' - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Cup of Coffee Not to Go

 

APP ORDERS ONLY

APP ORDERS ONLY

APP ORDERS ONLY

APP ORDERS ONLY

APP ORDERS ONLY

APP ORDERS ONLY

OUT OF ORDER

OUT OF ORDER

DRIVE THRU CLOSED TODAY        

 

 

                                 EXIT

Grandmama's Methodist Bible - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Grandmama’s Methodist Bible

“For all find what they truly seek”

-Aslan in C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle

 

The well-worn Bible my Methodist grandmother loved

Sunday school pictures of Jesus, brave and kind

Chaplains who suffered with us in Viet-Nam

Prison pastors who bring Light into the dark

 

The ministers and faithful in contested streets

The priest who blessed my mother as she died

Those sturdy Baptist friends who bless my days

The Glorious Mysteries in the Rosary of being

 

I love The Story in word and prayer and song -

But those who force a Reichskirche upon us

                                                         are wrong

Darwinianism Stalks the Suburbs - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Darwinianism Stalks the Suburbs

 

God giveth the earth the good green grass to grow

An unceasing samsara of life and death

Catalogues of life in their millions of forms

Work out their mandalas of being in that sea

 

Winds weave waving forests of tender blades

Chlorophyll makes magic from water and light

The apex predator is the lowly bacterium

Humbling at last great glorious carnivores

 

And there the eternal cycles of seed and sower

Are shredded on Saturdays by a suburban lawn mower

A Child Asked me a Reasonable Question about God - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Child Asked me a Reasonable Question about God

 

A child -

 

She asked of me

One day, you see

A question wise

For one her size

 

It wasn’t odd:

“I believe in God

But then does He

Believe in me?”

 

Because They are Young - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Because They are Young

 

For Those Who Have Lost Children

 

The good die young, our blessed children, our hope

Fresh to this world they wanted so much to explore

They wanted to explore everything – earth, air

Words, water, sky, ideas, music, art, love

 

All the joys of being; all Creation is their stupa

And they fly the eternal pradakshina

In fulfillment, enlightenment, and joy

Infinitely far, and yet still close to us

 

We are less because they have gone ahead

Along the happy pilgrimage of faith

But they are more, and they celebrate us too:

They love us and wait for us along the Way

 

The good die young, and because they are so good

We must strive to be worthy of them

Where is Herod's Father? - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Where is Herod’s Father?

 

…lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children,

and would not be comforted, because they are not.

-Saint Matthew 2:16-18

The Herod of today squats alone in his room

Alone, devoid of parenting or purpose

Feverishly feeling sorry for himself

His only friend is his Precious, his glowing screen

 

(And where is his father?)

 

He scribbles screaming screeds and manifestos

And draws cool pictures of army guns ‘n’ stuff

Mommy lets him do whatever he wants

Maybe another weapon will calm him down

 

(But where is his father?)

 

He counts the children in the village school

He draws a floor plan of the village church

He clutches his he-man tough guy army gear

He sends his sulkings through the GossipNet

 

(Oh, where is his father?)

 

A naked AR fantasy hangs on his wall

He takes him down, he wants to fondle him

He feels, he doesn’t think, he feels, he feels –

Maybe Moloch wasn’t such a bad guy after all

 

(Now where is Herod’s father?)