Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                      There is More Than One Book

A civilization writes and reads its books
As poetry, pictures, prose, and glorious song
Of war and work and love and peaceful fields
Scholarship and courage and a people’s arts

But when unhappy men with an unhappy god
Maintain that their one book is all we’ll need
In submission to build an empire of death
The threat is clear: their god doesn’t want us

Reading and writing are civilization
From the very beginning of Creation

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                         The Magic in Hebrew Words

Max gave me a book: 52 Hebrew Words
For Christmas
Appreciate the irony that isn’t there –
If Judaism isn’t real, then neither are we

Words in Hebrew seem to be topped as flames
As Light - the light as truth, the light for truth
As flame for sacrifice, as flame for peace
As Torah unrolled, all Creation unrolled

Everything begins with a word, the Word
Today we will begin with Shema – Hear

With gratitude

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                  Are You a Ptolemaic Too?


            There was a star danced, and under that I was born

                  -Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, II.i.349


This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got
Our Narnia, our Middle-Earth; it’s green
It’s green and blue and round, an almost-sphere
Fitted with all the ancient conveniences

Let the stars encircle us as a crown
And who will dare to say it is not so?
For we are commanded to grow this garden
By the light of the sun, and of faith and love

As Shakespeare might have said, this blessed plot -
This little world isn’t much, but it’s what we’ve got

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                     “LA Fires Bring Art to a Halt”

                 Hyperallergic: Sensitive to Art and Its Discontents


No.

A fire brings nothing to a halt

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives -

A poet abandoning her car to flee for her life
Holds to her heart her notebooks in a grocery-store bag

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

A trumpeter manages to save the mouthpiece at least
While carrying his child out to an ambulance

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

A sculptor’s eyes record a wall of windows
To be re-molded as life-filled windows of dreams

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives:

Firefighters wrestling a hose through smoke and heat
Are a choreograph of life against flaming death

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

An artist whose studio is now but smoke
Will stir ashes and water, and paint again

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

A little girl will write of her little dog
Her bestest pal whom she never saw again

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives

In a shelter tonight an aging man
Will sing to himself the love songs of his youth

To the last respiration of the very last soul
And beyond: Art will live because Art lives



                                                        ­       then patch

                    a few words together and don’t try
                    to make them elaborate, this isn’t
                    a contest but the doorway

                                   -Mary Oliver, “Praying”

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office


        May Our Children Live Long Enough to Invade Greenland


Man arrested entering the Capitol with a machete and three knives

                                          -U. K. Daily Mail


No weapons in the Capitol; it’s a rule
The adults who work there must be safely bubbled
But when some pimply oaf brings a gun to school
No one in D.C. seems especially troubled

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

               “Now, therefore, write for yourselves this song.”


          -Deuteronomy 31:19 per Talmud at My Jewish Learning
           <community@mail.myjewishlearning.com>


                       “Nunc itaque scribite vobis canticum istud.”

                                             -Douay-Rheims


What song will you write for the people of God?
Something from the Prophets or the Laws
A hymn for Mary, dancing in the spring
Or maybe praise for patient and protective Joseph

What song will you write for your own true love?
Gentle rhyming for the music of her gentle laugh
Iambics and meters her intellect to please
Birdsong sweet to limn her holiness

What song will you write for the world God made?
Matins for mist and mountain and flowered glade

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                        Daily Writing Discipline

My self-appointed duty is to write a line or two
Each day, no matter how busy I have been
But today at work I thought of little except you
And how your name is a verse upon the wind