Dragons for Your New Year - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

 

Dragons for Your New Year

 

For Doris and Anthony

Who have known dragons

 

Eustace had read only the wrong books; they had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.

 

-C. S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader

 

 

The dragons are a polite and ancient race

And very conscious of their dignity

It would not do to neglect their seasons and feasts

Lest they neglect to visit you this year

 

They want to bring good fortune to your house

But first you must make a place for them -

Their breath will warm your room, your hearth, your heart

Their knowledge will make your children worthy and wise

 

Their songs will send your family happy dreams

For dragons are a polite and generous race

Reader Responses in the U. K. DAILY MAIL

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Reader Responses in the U. K. Daily Mail

 

RepubliCraps. Demoncrats. Repugs. DemoCraps. MAGA. Magats. Maggots. Clown. Orange clown. Clowns. Clown show. Absolute clown show. Absolute commie clown show. Diaper Joe. Dr. Potatohead. Moron. Selected not elected. Deplorables. Trailer trash. Absolute trailer trash. Said no one ever. Oh wait. Lock her up. Lock him up. Throw away the key. Absolutely. Joebama. Drumpf. Dump. Woke. Wokista. Wokerati. Absolutely Woke. Biden’s America. Trump’s America. Mean tweets. No mean tweets. These teachers. These schools. These universities. TDS. Absolute TDS. Liberal idiots. Extremist idiots. Absolute idiots. ROFL. Grab some popcorn. …in 1, 2, 3…  Dumpster fire. Absolute dumpster fire. You can’t make this stuff up. Train wreck. Absolute train wreck. Car crash. Absolute car crash. Total car crash. The jokes write themselves. At its finest. Pure evil. Absolute pure evil. Cue crickets. Of biblical proportions. Of epic proportions. Of absolute epic biblical proportions. Rinse and repeat. Rules for thee but not for me. Two-tier justice system. Absolute two-tier justice system. You could look it up. Follow the science. Full stop. LOL. End of. Absolutely. Fact. FACT!!!!!

The Disinterment of Pablo Neruda - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Disinterment of Neruda

 

Qui sine peccato est vestrum, primus in aliam lapidem mittat

 

This Neruda - the Fascists murdered him

This Neruda - let us murder him again

The people read and love his poems too much

And they ignore ours – let us dig him up

 

This Neruda – we will dig him up

And subject him to our Inquisition

We now will tell you what each fragment means

Each fragment of each word, his flesh, his bone

 

We have our bullhorns and our three-beat chants

His poems will mean what we tell you they mean

 

Shut up

Let's Meet Again at the Robin Hood Oak - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Let’s Meet Again at the Robin Hood Oak

 

1.

 

In my boyhood, to the Robin Hood oak

I tip-toed in those hot summer afternoons

With my three sharp arrows and my little bow

Craftily eluding the sheriff’s men

 

I softly whistled and waited, and then anon

From out of the sun-shimmering heat

From out of the merry magical greenwood

An answering whistle sighed through the air

 

Great skill at making a bow or a plan -

I was a favorite among Robin’s band

 

2

 

In my old age, to the Robin Hood oak

I slowly walked in lonely afteryears

Carelessly, for I was a baron now

With my ownership and my walking stick

 

I whistled and waited, and waited more

From out of the sun-shimmering heat

From out of the merry magical greenwood

There was only a silence, a silence sad

 

Little boys grow up, and then must disappear -

And that’s okay; the magic is forever here

Poetry and Jazz Stroll into a Smoky Bar

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Poetry and Jazz Stroll into a Smoky Bar

 

Poetry, like jazz, is itself

If you feel a need to explain it

You’ve failed

                      Art sings itself

Wipe That Geographical Expression Off Your Face - quatrain

 Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

 

Wipe That Geographical Expression Off Your Face

 

Alas, poor country! / Almost afraid to know itself

 

-Macbeth IV.iii.164-165

 

We are now a geographical expression

An almost amorphous land mass occupied

By violent tribes of shifting loyalties

And assemblies of squabbling Merovingians

A Burning Car in Baghdad - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Burning Car in Baghdad

 

 

The delusion that by force you can impose the Millennium on the human race is one of the most dangerous delusions in existence.

― Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad

 

 

In the center of Baghdad a burning car

Illuminates long centuries of pain

Inflicted by schemes of improvement upon

A city of scholarship, wisdom, and art

 

Militias, commanders, air-strikes, and bombs

So clever that they can single out one car

Without harming another car at the traffic light -

And somehow this will make the world all better

 

Dullard journalists will type “tit-for-tat”

Because they don’t know anything else to say

 

And neither do I

Cups and Jugs and Kettles and Beds - something more than a quatrain

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Cups and Jugs and Kettles and Beds

 

St. Mark 7:1-13

 

Let the coffee cups rattle with denunciations

About the contextual meaning of “beds”

At the fossil table in the roadside café’

That Javneh of theological studies

 

For the health and comfort of our other guests

No smoking, please

A Sanitary Pad Along Beer Can Road - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Sanitary Pad Along Beer Can Road

 

 

To walk abroad, and recreate yourselves

 

-Julius Caesar III.ii.256

 

 

A sanitary pad along Beer Can Road

Sodden and heavy with the waning night’s damp

And beer cans shining in the morning sun

Completing a picture of misadventure

 

I once found a ratchet wrench about here

And a knot of twist-ties further along

And a couple of disposable lighters for toking crack

I’ll just give this latest detritus a miss

 

But on my morning stroll I won’t pass by

Without a prayer for happiness for all

 

Especially my nocturnal predecessors

 

A Dusty Drum Kit - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Dusty Drum Kit

 

In a re-sale shop in Huntington, Texas

 

Fronting for decaying videotapes

And clocks that will never again chime the time

Through tinny mechanical syncopation

A drum set reposes without percussion

 

An arpeggio of silent despair

Whose cymbals and snare impatiently wait

As do the bass and other impedimenta

For the hand of a youth who has something to howl

 

The next kid through the door might bell the cat:

“There it is – I will rhythm the truth with that!”

 

C. S. Lewis on the Monarchy

 

Monarchy can easily be ‘debunked;' but watch the faces, mark the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose tap-root in Eden has been cut: whom no rumour of the polyphony, the dance, can reach - men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire equality, they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.

 

-C.S. Lewis, “Present Concerns,” 1948

The Latest Atmospheric River End-of-the-World Pineapple Express Bomb Cyclone from H**l

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Latest Atmospheric River End-of-the-World 

Pineapple Express Bomb Cyclone from H**l

 

 

The news is falling! The news is falling!

 

-as Chicken Little did not say

 

 

An apocalyptic storm of such intensity

We’re all going to drown in a flood of breaking news

The streets already overflowing with hyperbole

From reporters in damp shoes awaiting their cues

A Quatrain to Explain the Infinite Monkey Theory

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Quatrain to Explain the Infinite Monkey Theory

 

If you set a monkey at a typewriter

To type and type for all eternity

What he will type, that little blighter

Is a politician’s speech – nonsense, you see!

Sacrifice in a Low Place - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Sacrifice in a Low Place

 

Cf. 1 Kings 3

 

I would go to a high place and sacrifice to God

But there is no high place; this is an alluvial plain

Dark with conifers except along the sloughs

Dark in their own ways with cypress and oak

 

And I am old, too old to be a prophet

And I have often asked for all the wrong things

So I will take those things into the dark

And leave them at the foot of a pagan oak

 

I will learn the statutes from the whisperings

I will go into the quiet, and listen for God

A Rotor-Tiller and the Feast of the Presentation - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Rotor-Tiller and the Feast of the Presentation

 

Names have not been restored, as Aslan says

Some are pleased to call this Ground-Hog Day

Although there are no ground hogs here

But the Presentation is everywhere and forever

 

I passed the morning deconstructing the tiller

                                   (instead of sacred texts)

Working debris from around the tines

Thinking about the coming spring and how -

How the Presentation is everywhere and forever

 

Names have not been restored, as Aslan says

Still, the Presentation is everywhere and forever

Browsing the Poetry Titles in the Book Store - oh, yeah

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Browsing the Poetry Titles in the Book Store

 

I soon had a thorough understanding of the rules. For a poem to go through 

                         there had to be a few lines devoted to [         ]

 

-Yevtushenko, p. 68, A Precocious Autobiography

 

Call Me by the Post-Colonial Things We Carried Without Borders in the Boat in the Twilight Garden of our Being Unsilencing the Silent Voices Songs of Our Powerful People Aimlessly in Fire New and Selected Hopes To Change Your Life Forever Becoming the Healing                                                                                                                                                              You Always Wanted to Be in the Emptiness Within While Searching the Soul of the Underself in Quest of Anti-hierarchy For Elegies of the Lover

Who

Never

Was

But

Who

Might

Be on the Silences of Screaming Wings in a Rhapsody of a Plangent Tangent of Voided Meanings at the End of the             Rainbow World When a Golden Sickle Pierced the Sighings of                     the Moon in  Your Shivering Hand Leaves in the Exiled Gentleness of              Barbed Wire Pillows Comforting Your Cerulean Soul-Quest of Meaningful    Meaninglessness adrift in the Writhing  

 

 

Arms of your Powerful Weakness as a Twinkling Pancreas Vaults        Ambition Through Disconnected Quotes from Shakespeare Who was My           Soul-Twin Aflame with Passionless Passion for a Forbidden Vegetable Incarnadining     the Cosmic Cypress of Your Unattainable Body Through the Music of                 the Trapezoids as the Forbidden Kiss of Life

And, like, stuff

She Had a Problem With Amarillo, Texas - quatrain

50. 31 January 2024, Wednesday in the 4^th week in Ordinary Time.

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

She Had a Problem with Amarillo, Texas

 

She bought a revolver and a box of cartridges

And on her way outta town she put six rounds

Into the Amarillo city limits sign                               

And for the most part lived happily ever after

 

 

This is something told to me long ago. Amarillo is great fun and could be a vacation destination.

 

25 Amazing Things to Do in Amarillo - Lone Star Travel Guide

"My Oath of Enlistmant Does Not Have an Expiration Date" - well, yeah, it does

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

“My Oath of Enlistment Does Not Have an Expiration Date”

 

Well, yeah, it does

 

If it doesn’t then I’m out of uniform

If it doesn’t then I’m absent without leave

          (54 years – you’d think someone would have noticed)

If it doesn’t then I need to report to base

If it doesn’t then I must obey President Biden

 

If it doesn’t then I must obey all officers

          (Is that a shavetail ensign at my door?)

If it doesn’t then the manual of arms…

          (With a walking-stick? Really?)

If it doesn’t then I gotta get up at 0400

If it doesn’t then my Sperry Topsiders need a shine

 

I left my oath of enlistment in Viet-Nam

There, with the memories of many dear friends

It will rest in peace without any regard

For someone else’s made-in-China slogan tee

Elon Musk Invites Us Down for Chips and Dip and Destruction - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Elon Musk Invites Us Down for Chips and Dip and Destruction

 

They have pulled down Deep Heaven on their Heads

 

-C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength

 

He’s implanted a chip, says Mr. Musk

Into the brain (certainly not the hip)

Of some poor patient who’s now just a husk

A talking head, a thing, a radar blip

 

And what could go wrong with this poor android

A man now fitted with an electric brain

Adjusted and programmed and tweaked and toyed -

A failed experiment thrashing in pain?

 

And if he fails, this humanoid chip

Musk might use him for guacamole dip

 

Electronic chips, as with eyeglasses, pacemakers, and artificial joints, will make our lives better through the good work of good and wise healers and scientists. But I don't trust just anyone in the matter.

A Penny Candle - and if You Don't Have a Penny, Love will Do - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Penny Candle – and if You Don’t Have a Penny, Love Will Do

 

The key to the lighting of a church candle is that, in its tiny light, all the mystery of life is drawn up into an eternity excluding only sorrow and loss.

-Tod Mixson

 

It’s not just that a candle struggles against darkness

But that we do too, trying to sort the chaos

With weary eyes and unsure, trembling hands -

But it is something that we’ve lit the candle

 

It’s not just that a candle flickers in the darkness

But that we shape against shadows all our hopes

Bundling them into a pilgrim’s haversack

For whatever remains of our journey to Light

 

For in the end we give the candle away

Offering it to a passing Whisper in the night