Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
“Kind Hearts are More than Coronets”
Tennyson – “Lady Clare Vere de
Vere”
But coronets
will get you set
In better
seats at Goodwood, you bet
(Doesn't everyone read Tennyson on Sunday afternoon?)
Sunday, October 12, 2025
Kind Hearts are More Than Coronets - rhyming doggerel
Sunday, October 5, 2025
Saint Vincent Ferrer and I Go Fishing in a Toilet Tank - weak doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Saint Vincent Ferrer and I Go Fishing in a Toilet Tank
And the master-salesman asked of him and me:
Is the flapper-valve, yea, verily, two inches or three?
-not exactly according to Ultimate Guide: Plumbing, Creative Homeowner, 2021
Toilet bowls are fascinating to dogs and cats
Like watering holes on the Serengeti plains
Their cousins hunt among the desert flats
In the seasons between sweet nourishing rains
Strange noises in the dark…
But when the water gushes both day and night
St. Vincent and I must pray and think and work
To work this ceramic water-hole aright
For Luna and Pushkin to hunt and lurk
The animals watch impatiently…
Our labors at last are proven to be blest
As water flows like a smooth anapest!
A Sidewalk Table at Pouline's - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Saturday, October 4, 2025
Tell Me About Your Day - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Friday, October 3, 2025
So I Got to Pike's Peak... - short poem
Lawrence Hall
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
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
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
Thursday, October 2, 2025
Jesus and a Reference to Fowler's Modern English Usage - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
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.")
Wednesday, September 24, 2025
I am not God - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
I am not God
About
final judgement
Just
give it a rest -
God does salvation
We do our best
Monday, September 22, 2025
An Unhappy O. Henry Ending - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
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
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
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
Saturday, September 20, 2025
The Leaker Demands Informers - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
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
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
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
The Brass-Elevator Mountaineer, Poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
That To-Go Coffee Ain't Goin' - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Grandmama's Methodist Bible - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Saturday, September 6, 2025
Darwinianism Stalks the Suburbs - poem
Lawrence Hall
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
Friday, September 5, 2025
A Child Asked me a Reasonable Question about God - poem
Lawrence Hall
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?”
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