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

                                        The Winter Cold Has Gotten Old

  For many years I was a self-appointed inspector of snow-storms...

                                         -Thoreau, Walden

The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees
And little lights in all their vestmental tints
No longer counterpoint the dark northern breeze
No visions of spring, no dreamings, no hints

The happy lawns of summer are mud and frost
The path to the cowshed is a rattle of sleet
The trail to the fishing hole was yesterday lost
And our boots are too thin for our freezing feet

But after our chores, boiling hot coffee, please -
The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees!

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

                            Your Poetry's Background Check

          And above all, who is in power in that part of the country,
          or, rather, who will be by the time we get there?

                                  -Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

We don’t suffer a Soviet Writers’ Union
Except that we do – and what are you up to?
Have you written an ordinary adjective
That will be forbidden in a future place?
                    You sound suspiciously colonialist

Last year DEI was mandatory
This year it will be a forbidden scheme
What guidelines for little magazines
Will be cleansed in the New Order to come?
                    Harriet Monroe is a non-person now

Who will be in charge of your poetry and your life
Whenever you don’t get to wherever it was
                    that you were going?

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

                                         Stand-To for Night Patrol


                      The Americans were said to believe that the
                      Communists are on the defensive…

                          -New York Times, 11 January 1970


I keep seeing a boat’s black silhouette
Upon the red water, against the red sky
And the black-death tree-line along the shore
A dark, decaying scene, and I don’t know why

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”