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Lawrence Hall Nov 2018
…These men are worth your tears:
You are not worth their merriment.

-Wilfred Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”

When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean? Paradise Lost? Probably not
Nor Saint Paul speaking on the Field of Mars

The Kalevala, Hagia Sophia
With its pendentives lifting up our prayers
Horatius fighting to defend his bridge
And Wilfred Owen dying bravely on his

Lord Tennyson and Idylls of the King
Chapultepec, Henry V, Becket
The paratroops at Arnhem, Saint Thomas More,
His King’s loyal servant, but God’s first

The Stray Dog poets of Saint Petersburg
The brave last stand of Roland at Roncesvalles
Lewis and Tolkien and glasses of beer
Montcalm and Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham

Hildegard von Bingen, Siegfried and the Rhine
Magna Carta, HMS Hood, the Thames
The Grove of Daphne, “The Old Rugged Cross”
Beatrix Potter and her little pet rabbit

El Cid, Anne Frank, John Keats, Saint Benedict
“I Have a Dream,” Dostoyevsky, and Greene
Viktor Frankl, Dag Hammarkskjold, and Proust
Good Chaucer’s naughty pilgrims telling tales

The Gettysburg Address, Willie and Joe
Stern Saint Augustine of North Africa
Wodehouse writing a jolly bit of fun
Saint Corbinian and Bavaria

The ancient glories of Byzantium
Pius XII contra the bombs and lies
The 602nd TD Battalion
Saint Joan, the Prado, and Robert Frost

And far, far more.

When that loudmouth on the wireless machine
Alludes to Western Civilization
What does he mean?
Of your mercy please pray for the repose of the soul of Wilfred Owen who was killed in action on 4 November 1918, one week before the Armistice.
Elizabeth L May 2014
Cuando era niña, mi mamá told me to speak in spanish cuando I couldn't say mis "r"s en inglés.  Garlic made my mouth stink from the broth I drank when sick, so I ate spicy things to soothe my throat.  Muchas veces comímos tamales por la Navidad.  Cuando era niña, creí que era mexicana, pero soy blanca.  Y tengo miedo de hablar español en frente de los nativos y no sé como mostrarlos mi habilidad real.  En el fín, soy una wera, y más que eso, soy francés, y más que eso, soy alemán, and more than that, I'm finnish.

I tried to take pride in my heritage and learn this obscure language.  I tried to find similarities in appearance and personality.  I boasted of this culture that I so wanted to love and be a part of.  I thought I'd found my viking roots but no one around me cared.  I learned "tourist finnish" and forgot it because I couldn't practice.  I read the Kalevala and laughed at old newspaper articles about the joke of "St. Uhro's Day."  I pointed out weird translations in songs due to too many syllables, but in the end, I was too many generations away from being truly finnish.

Why are there so many poems about love?  Maybe it's because when we're in love we stop searching for somewhere to belong because we've found someone to belong to.  I've found my person but not my people.  I've been to seven schools and cried each time I left because I lost those I had tried to make into my extended family.  I try to fit in with so many groups because I feel like I never fit in with just one and in the end I'm on the outskirts.  We have so few people come to holidays and none of them really ever talk with me.  I have a mother but she's an island in a sea of lost chances and forgotten ties.  We seek love to have a claim to something but I've had to learn that I can lose that, too.  I strive for heritage to make up for family dysfunction.  In the end I am white, or rather, white-washed.  I was born without ethnic belonging and have not belonged ever since.
Lawrence Hall Feb 2019
The cold told a tale to me
the rain suggested poems
                                     another tale the winds brought
                                     the sea’s billows drove;
                                     the birds added words
                                     the treetops phrases

                        -The Kalevala, I, “In the Beginning” 1

We’re born to light and water and earth and air
Yet most of my life I cared little for verse,
But somehow words have become wonderful,
Even beloved because poetry -

- Poetry takes the chaos (or apparent chaos?)
Of life, and gently sings it into meaning
Through line, stanza, meter, and metaphor,
Shapes it, loves it, and makes it beautiful.

Poetry is like baptism, perhaps,
Or painting, sculpting, drawing, making music,
Or digging and setting a post-hole just right,
Helping set one’s perceptions of reality just right

And it is beautiful




1 The Kalevala. Elias Lonnrot. Trans. Keith Bosley. An Oxford World’s Classics Paperback.  OUP. New York. 1989.
Y'r 'umble scriverner tries never to write in the first person or to write about writing; here he fails.
JGuberman Sep 2016
I saw a portrait of Uri Zvi Greenberg,
it showed an older man
perhaps twice my age,
with no recognizable poetic traits in his face,
perhaps had they shown a young man
it would've been different?

I saw a portrait of Miklos Radnoti
he died as a young man,
with no recognizable poetic traits in his face,
and I have nearly lived his full life,
perhaps if they had shown a child
it would've been different?

I saw a portrait of Anne Frank
whom all the world knows.
I am twice her age,
it's not different
it's worse
peace comes regardless of age
it begins for the living
at the expense of the dead.

I saw a portrait from when I was a child,
like the opening lines of
the epic poem I am becoming,
I will not be a national treasure
like the Kalevala
or Shahnameh
I will be immortalized
like all the unnamed citizens
of Uruk
remembered merely because they lived there,
whose names are unknown
like those
who did not leave a diary,
or a notebook of poems,
and like sheep to the slaughter
did not live to my time to read them.
This poem was published in EUROPEAN JUDAISM (UK) 34:2 (Autumn 2001), p. 153.
U.Z. Greenberg (1894-1981) was an Israeli poet born in what is now Ukraine. His views were rightwing and he was associated with the party of Menahem Begin. He wrote powerful and sometimes lurid poems about the Holocaust.

Miklos Radnoti (1909-1944) a martyred Hungarian Jewish poet.

Anne Frank (1929-1945) young Jewish diarist martyred at Bergen Belsen and made famous posthumously with the publication of her wartime diary.

Kalevala-Finnish national epic.
Shahnameh- Persian "Book of Kings" an Iranian national epic by Firdawsi (c. CE 935-1020/26).

Uruk-setting of the Epic of Gilgamesh

last four lines all refer to the writings of  Anne Frank (diary), Radnoti (notebook of poems) and "like sheep..." is a line taken from Greenberg's poem TO GOD IN EUROPE, part III No Other Instances.
Donall Dempsey Jul 2015
And, so
he marries the Finn and

Väinämöinen
walks in

dragging the whole Kalevala
behind him on a sled

opening the word box
for the sounds to escape

and leave
to dwell inside him

the myths and lore
of Love.

A cloudberry
falling into her

pregnant
belly button

the child
fashioned from her

living in the quick quick
midnight tales

the frozen hoard of words
thawing

as my hearing
takes them in

the unborn
listening to its future

in its past.

Words upon lips
dissolving into laughter

like a falling snowflake
on the tip of a pink tongue

stuck out in
the Aurora Borealis.
***

My Finnish wife brought a dowry of an unknown mythology and on long Finnish nights told me the stories mingling them with love and laughter which was the best way to hear the tales! I also remember us looking at HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR with Finnish subtitles so that she had to translate it back into English for me creating a telling that still lives in my mind. The telling is all!


The Kalevala or The Kalewala is a 19th-century work of epic poetry compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Karelian and Finnish oral folklore and mythology.

It is regarded as the national epic of Karelia and Finland and is one of the most significant works of Finnish literature. The Kalevala played an instrumental role in the development of the Finnish national identity, the intensification of Finland's language strife and the growing sense of nationality that ultimately led to Finland's independence from Russia in 1917.

The first version of The Kalevala (called The new Kalevala) was published in 1835. The version most commonly known today was first published in 1849 and consists of 22,795 verses, divided into fifty songs (Finnish: runot). The title can be interpreted as "The land of Kaleva" or "Kalevia".

The poem begins with an introduction by the singers. The Earth is created from the shards of a duck egg and the first man (Väinämöinen) is born to the goddess Ilmatar.

Väinämöinen brings trees and life to the barren world.

Akseli Gallen-Kallela (26 April 1865 – 7 March 1931) was a Swedish-speaking Finnish painter whose Kalevala paintings
and illustrations are almost integral to its story.

My favourite translation was published in 1989 by Keith Bosley (Oxford University Press) who has now brought out an audio book read by himself with a running time of 13 hours and 23 minutes!
Lawrence Hall Jul 2018
Tollite vobiscum verba, et convertimini ad Dominum

-Osee 14:3 1

Provide yourself with words, with magic words,
And like Old Väinämöinen 2 sing them
Into the air, the wild, clean air, those words
Sing all that’s Good and Beautiful and True

The Sampo 2 of your mind spins not out flour
Nor salt nor gold, but needful thoughts and songs
In words that sing and sail beyond the sun
And back into that Founding whence they came

Write, then, the Good, the Beautiful, the True
And let God write them back again to you



1 Osee / Hosea
2 The Kalevala
Your ‘umble scrivener’s site is:
Reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.
It’s not at all reactionary, tho’ it might be drivel.
Lawrence Hall Jul 2017
A Secret University

You registered for university
When in the womb you were beloved of God
Your classes then began when you were born
When you awoke, and saw your mother’s eyes

And in them all the possibilities
Of life, of golden life, given to you
Upon this planet with its flowered fields
Forests and rivers beneath its moon and sun

And all these tell you, in eternal Song1
That all the world is your university


1In The Kalevala, in Lewis’ Narnia, and in many faiths, God sings the world into being.

— The End —