Where are the Back-to-School Ads? - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Where are the Back-to-School Ads?

The tumult in the heart

Keeps asking questions

-Elizabeth Bishop, “Four Poems: I / Conversation”

Where are the summer’s-end back-to-school ads?
No dancing pencils or princess backpacks
No brand-new notebooks with bright plastic tabs
No staplers, glue, file folders, paper, or pens

No laughing children in jeans and tops and tees
No ‘way-cool sneaks or socks or flippy skirts
No fashion purses, no funny new hats
No Disney images of hallway fun

There is no merriment this new school year
Only chemicals and distancing
                                                                and fear

Dostoyevsky's House of the Living - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Dostoyevsky’s House of the Living

“I was in prison…and you came to see me.”

-Saint Matthew 25: 34-26

Dostoyevsky is possibly the best writer of narratives of redemption, probably because of his time in prison. I first read The House of the Dead along with other of his novels some years ago. Recently I was "guilted" by Fr. Ron (I did not want to go) into volunteering at prison with con, which in the event has proven to be one of the few experiences in my life in which I felt - one cannot know, of course - that I was doing exactly what God expected of me. This volunteer work with the chaplain, a sturdy Baptist, and with wise and experienced volunteers and mentors, especially Al and George, led me to re-read Dostoyevsky’s semi-autobiographical prison novel.

As a young man Dostoyevsky was drawn into the Petrashevsky Circle in Saint Petersburg, which may or may not have planned the violent overthrow of the government. The group was arrested in1849, held in the Peter and Paul fortress in Saint Petersburg, tried, and sentenced to death. The Czar’s pardon of the conspirators even as they faced a firing party is well known.

Dostoyevsky spent four years in a Siberian prison camp and then a term as a soldier until he was permitted to return to Saint Petersburg in 1859.

The parallels in the unit I visit and Dostoyevsky's prison are remarkable, even to the general layout of the prison and to the diverse characters and nationalities of the images. In the local prison, though, prisoners are respected and treated with dignity in preparation for their return to freedom. Successful completion of anger management and other counseling programs are mandatory for release.

But please note than I know almost nothing about penology or psychology, and my two hours each week visiting the lads are as nothing. I am neither a Pollyanna nor a Darwinian, but only a sympathetic if naïve observer.

First, about that famous cable tv: there are in fact two of them, rather small, high up on a wall in the common area, and remotely controlled by the duty officer. No prisoner has much time for watching tv, though, for everyone has a work detail. A man might be dozing on his bunk in the early evening, but that’s because his work assignment begins in the kitchen at 0300 and he must also attend classes. There are no private rooms; all live in dorms that very much resemble my recruit training barracks in the long-ago.

Prisons do not exist so that visitors like me can write sappy articles about “What I learned in prison” because prison is about the prisoner, about helping him learn about himself and his place in civilization. Dostoyevsky would say that learning is a part of a man’s redemption, on either side of the shiny wire.

But I have learned this: the difference between a man behind the wire and a man outside the wire is often only that one man is behind the wire and the other is outside the wire.

Okay, that’s a bit precious, but a reality is that there are far more criminals on the outside than on the inside.

Another reality in the unit I visit is the diversity of individuals with regard to faith traditions, race, intellect, accomplishments, education, and skills. I have met once-wealthy businessmen who admitted that their success in life led them to a feeling of arrogance and immunity. I have met twenty-somethings who did stupid stuff because popular culture and their local subcultures led them to existential despair. The CPA is in a bunk next to the low-level drug dealer. Someone conversant in seven languages and who holds a master’s degree is bunked next to the kid who helped himself to someone else’s car on a dare.

C. S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that in the army, “Every few days one seemed to meet a scholar, an original, a poet, a cheery buffoon, or at the least a man of good will.” And so it is in prison as it is in the army or on the job.

My prison is a transit unit, with folks coming and going constantly, either on their way to a long-term sentence at one of the large units, serving a short sentence here, or, happily, cycling through the various programs and consultations in preparation for release. I regret that I seldom get to know anyone very well, but in the context of the mission that’s probably for the best.

Unfortunately, all prison visits in my state are now forbidden during the coronavirus time. I do miss the guys, and hope I have been of some small service in their rehabilitation. I pray for them daily, and hope to be permitted to resume working with them soon.


http://www.encspb.ru/object/2804022508;jsessionid=777C33E31108B724645FFEDA4512B4CF?lc=en

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1997/02/24/dostoyevskys-unabomber

-30-

God Behind the Mask - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

God Behind the Mask

Perceiving God in someone else’s smile
Is awkward even in the best of times
But now we only see a dear friend’s eyes

Although

In fresh new ways - surprises every day

We notice masks because we failed to see
The givenness of daily saints obscured
Only by easy familiarity
Inattention on the road to Emmaus

Perceiving God in someone else’s eyes –
Maybe it’s easier now

Catnap - MePhone Photograph

Midway Through THE OXFORD BOOK OF ENGLISH VERSE - poem

Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Midway Through
The Oxford Book of Christian Verse

O, oh, ah, ah me!

Wand’ring, ling’ring, confin’d, lock’d, undiscover’d
Own’d, enthron’d, flow’ring, and perplex’d
Tho’, fetter’d, hallow’d, spread’st, leav’st,
    vouchsaf’st, ‘midst
Th’eternal, th’unwearied, t’express, pass’d

Slipp’ry, congeal’d, ‘twere, ev’ry, hurl’d, triumph’d
‘Twas, sinn’d, cleans’d, ‘bove, astonish’d, t’expire,
     bid’st, o’er
Scatter’d, hugg’d, bow’d, summ’d, e’er, fill’d,
     disappear’d
Bow’r, flourish’d, heav’n, anger’d, dissol’vd,
     wither’d, stain’d

Hark!

O antic scriv’ner, huddled in your cowl
Coulds’t I purchase a gross or two of vow’l?

Toadstools After a Summer Rain - MePhone Photograph

The Potter's Wheel - Whimsy with a Spin on Pathos

Lawrence Hall, HSG
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

The Potter’s Wheel

Is one of three upon his pickup truck,
Which in truth never picks up anything
Because the pottery thing did not work out
And so his cousin found him a county job

Sometimes he wanders through the garden shop
And finds the earthen art that once was his:

Hecho en Mexico
Fabrique au Chine
Duoc san xuat lai viet nam
Buatan Indonesia

He sighs in remembrance, and turns away -
And did I mention that his name is Clay?

Where in (Newark, New Jersey) is the "“Revert to Legacy Blogger” option to be found?

Change is not always good; this new interface is the sort of change evidenced in decaying road kill.

A World Lit Only by Double-A Batteries - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

A World Lit Only by Double-A Batteries 1

A fashionable square plastic tick-tock clock
A pocket flashlight, a little radio
Hurricane lanterns positioned against the storms
The innards of bleep-bleeping smoke alarms

A police-scanner, toys, remote controls
Clever little sphygmomanometers
Bedtime book lights, magnifying glasses
Bubba-cap headlamps, tiny little fans

How many uses! Let us count the ways 2 -
Against the darkness flinging our double-A’s


1 Cf. A World Lit Only by Fire, William Manchester

2 Cf. Sonnet 43, Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Book Shops Offer Us Civilizations - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Book Shops Offer Us Civilizations

Book shops offer us civilizations
Democracies of the living and the dead -
Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes,
     and you
Over cups of coffee wrangle meter and rhyme

Book shops offer us civilizations

James Weldon Johnson, Keats, and Claude McKay
Are questioning Auden along Aisle 3
Yevtushenko scoffs at bureaucracy
Ahkmatova Stray Dogs the lot of us

Book shops offer us civilizations

And only an unhappy man who has lost his way
Obsesses on the bookseller’s DNA

Old Pete, a Mighty Hunter Before the Lord - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Old Pete, a Mighty Hunter Before the Lord

A cigar box of childhood photographs
And there he is, that mighty courser – Old Pete
Thunder-Tail-Thumper, pal of barefoot boys
Chaser of rabbits and tasty table scraps

Always up for a ramble to the pond
In the day-dreamy midsummer heat
Where I pole-fished for perch, and good old Pete
Drowsed in the shade, and looked at me with love

I buried him under his favorite oak
Where, with eternity, he waits for me

A Celebration of Water-Hose Clamps - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

A Celebration of Water-Hose Clamps

“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”

― Cicero 1

Poets have been mysteriously silent 2
On the subject of water-hose clamps
Small cylinders or rings, threaded for compression
In mending or nozzling a garden hose

Thus if you have a clamp, you have a hose
In need of mending, and if you have a hose
You have a garden in need of watering
And if you have a garden, you are much blest

And in your garden you can drowse over a book
While meditating upon water-hose clamps


1 http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Cic.%20Fam.%209.4

2 https://www.quora.com/What-did-G-K-Chesterton-mean-by-poets-have-been-mysteriously-silent-on-the-subject-of-cheese?share=1

When I was on the Faculty at Notre Dame... - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

When I was on the Faculty at Notre Dame…

Tom Morris is a modern American philosopher of such influence that he once persuaded a board or committee of august personages at Notre Dame that I should be on the faculty.

And I was.

For a few weeks one summer.

Along with a dozen or so other recipients of a summer National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship in the long ago.

Be impressed.

The maître d’ / headwaiter / manager of the faculty dining room was definitely not impressed, but that’s a story for another paragraph.

In illo tempore Dr. Morris (“Call me Tom”) was a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, entrusted by President Reagan and William Bennett, then chairman – no human is a chair – of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to divert some of that endowment to a few mere high school teachers. Now Tom writes books, books of such great wisdom and clarity that you and I can understand them, and speaks to groups of the wise and the powerful (and possibly sometimes to the merely silly) all over the world.

And so it came to pass that I filled out forms and wrote essays and was chosen to participate in an NEH Summer Seminar to study philosophy with brilliant and funny Professor Morris at the University of Notre Dame.

A year or so later Tom asked several of us to read a draft of his work in progress, Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life.

My contribution is a comma on page 34. I’m very proud of that comma, so if you find that book please do look up my comma. You can then say that you know someone who made a significant contribution to a brilliant contemporary work of philosophy easily understood by all (even by me).

All this babbling is a too-long preface to a marvelous recent book by Tom, The Oasis Within. The book is a series of little lessons and thinking exercises framed in the story of a boy and his uncle on a camel caravan through Egypt in 1934.

The story can be read solely as a story, and it would be both diverting and useful, but the thinking reader will also consider the many questions about the meanings in one’s life and the nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In an unhappy time when discourse is pretty much limited to people screaming ill-considered absolutes at each other, we listen to young Walid and his Uncle Ali reflect on the events of each day progress in their journey, and their friends Hamid, Masoon (warrior and cook), Hakeem, Bancom, an unnamed lady of great wisdom, other travelers and business people, and treacherous (Boooo! Hissss!) Faisul.

In the end, Walid learns that he is a royal prince, but that adventure is developed further in the next book in the series, The Golden Palace and The Stone of Giza.

Every event in the story is of course itself and each chapter is centered on daily happenings along the way, but each is also representative of the challenges everyone faces in life and the need for careful observation followed by ethical and rational choices. Each chapter, then, can be considered as a leisurely daily lesson in perceiving, thinking, feeling, and developing logical solutions in pursuit of an ethical purpose.

The Oasis Within is not a religious book, nor is it antithetical to any religious faith, except perhaps to those who believe in The Lizard People and albino monks lurking in secret caves beneath the Pentagon.

A common misapprehension is that philosophy is an alternative to faith, which is simply not so. “Philosophy” is Greek for the love of wisdom, and wisdom is but careful observation and wise application. On pages 123 and 138, for instance, the consideration of a duality at first struck me through my filter of Christianity as sailing close to Manichaeism, and I quibble with the use of the terms “fate” and “destiny” on page 145, but then this book is not a religious text, and, after all, a happy and challenging debate on any topic is an essential of civilization.

When we install a new battery in the lawn mower or a car, there are but two choices about electrical polarity – we connect the cables and battery positive to positive and negative to negative. There is no trinitarian doctrine of the battery, and “positive” and “negative” in the context of a vehicle’s electrical system are not value judgments.

Thus it is with books of philosophy and conversations with Uncle Ali. We listen to each other and we learn from each other. If we scream at each other then nothing worthy is accomplished.

The Oasis Within is available from amazon.com as an inexpensive paperback.

And now, let us harken back to those golden days of yesteryear, when we
One day we chose to exercise a faculty privilege and enjoy lunch at the faculty club. We dressed up (in those Ye Olden Days, nice dresses for most of the women and blazers and ties for most of the men), and with our faculty cards in hand presented ourselves.

The courtesies and kindnesses extended to us by Professor Morris and, indeed, every academic we were privileged to meet at Notre Dame did not extend to the faculty club. The maître d’ / headwaiter / manager regarded us with the icy disdain of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha finding a caterpillar in her vichyssoise, and only after some persuasion and presentations of proofs of our specialness and a bit of standing our ground and refusing to go away were we hoi polloi (that’s like, you know, Greek, and, like, stuff) (the only Greek I know) grudgingly permitted to enter the dining room. The poor man did not tell us to wipe our feet or refrain from blowing our noses on the linen napkins, but we could tell that he was not anticipating appropriate demeanor from us.

In the event we enjoyed a perfectly nice lunch, lifted a glass in honor of our wise professor, discussed Blaise Pascal’s Pensees, (I had seen a working reproduction of his calculating machine, ca 1642, at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, but no one was impressed), and refrained from putting our feet on the table or throw bread rolls at anyone.

I think Uncle Ali would concur that not putting one’s feet on the table or throwing bread rolls at lunch comes under topic #6 of the Seven Secrets, about developing good character.

The headwaiter would probably agree.

http://www.tomvmorris.com/
http://ami19.org/Pascaline/IndexPascaline-English.html

-30-

What Are We Anti Today? - short poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

What Are We Anti Today?

“’Cause we’re the people, and we just keep on a’dragging each other down.”

-as Ma Joad does not say in The Grapes of Wrath

Being against a man because he is
Against another man will not thus lead
A man to be a man for any man

Frog Eggs in the Bees' Pool - MePhone Photograph 22 July 2020

Frogs are marvelous - they devour mosquitoes and other pests, and are biological markers: frogs are susceptible to pollution, so if you have frogs you have a clean environment.

Bees also are marvelous - without their pollination activity we would starve. They need fresh water, but since they can't take off from the water be sure to provide them with debris from which they can launch after they have refreshed themselves.

Silence Gives only Itself - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Silence Gives only Itself

“What does it betoken, this silence?”

-Cromwell in Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons

 

Soft silences are beautiful and rare
Those happy gifts of meditation given
Unify self in wise tranquility
Pondering transcendent reality

Inside the narratives of the pensive mind

Defining through an absence of endeavors
Considerations of eternal verities
Outside the fallenness of space and time

Mankind can never be masters of fate

Reason shows us that Cassius was wrong
About that, and about false fate itself
Doubts sometimes must determinations
     precede

Every occasion for reason is just and fair -

Soft silences are beautiful and rare

Coy Litotes - Haiku

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

We Were Diffidently Addressed

By coy Litotes
Who were not unworthy of
Their reputation

After the Wedding - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

After the Wedding

The night outside was cold; the fire was warm
And so was she, all golden in the light
That gentle light, a glass of wine in hand
Her eyes, her lips sweet tributes to God’s grace

We spoke of love, of what was good and true
And beautiful, of promises freely given
Of trust anointed through those promises
And then she put her glass aside, and whispered:

“I love you so much; you need only ask
Since now for you only will I slip off

                                                                                           my mask”

A Tyburn Tree in Diebus Nostris - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

A Tyburn Tree in Diebus Nostris

This summer seems to be a Tyburn Tree
Everything upright connects to crossing beams
Whose angles cancel every aspiration
In a suspension of time, of thought, of hope

This summer seems to be a Tyburn Tree
Everything horizontal paused in place
Resting upon the uprights locked in theirs
In a suspension of all purposes

This summer seems to be a Tyburn Tree
Where our uncertainties together hang