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

                                       Tiny Artists of the Night

Snowflakes by flashlight in the deepening dark
I left them to their night of proper tasks
They beamed down to the earth all over the park
And for the cold grey dawn they’ve made great masks

Plateaus of iridescent white to layer the lawn
Transcendent beauty in a transient medium
Still falling against the feeble all-day dawn
Little artists who form great truths from tedium

And then mysteriously they fly away
To shape more existentials some other day

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

                                           The Dignity of the Office

Whatever the incoming president fancies
(One hopes to speak without fear of libel)
Ageing (entertainers) in chancy pantsies
And will he take his oaf on a Village People Bible?

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

                          The White House Inaugural Banquet
                           and the Idle Dishwashing Machine


                    Henry II: Fork?

                    Becket: It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the
                                 mouth. It saves you dirtying your fingers.

                    Henry II: But then you ***** the fork.

                    Becket: Yes, but it's washable.

                    Henry II: So are your fingers. I don't see the point.

                                                   -Becket (1964)

The White House dishwashing machine is idle, kids
Our leaders grub with fingers for their food
Cardboarded burgers as greasy pyramids
On mahogany Queen Anne tables strewed

The sycophants kiss their effendi’s (ring)
And fall to feeding at his soigne trough
No waiters are needed to pour and pass
The diners chortle and chew and choke and cough

The White House dishwashing machine is idle, guys
(Dessert is Velveeta oozing over French fries)

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

                          The Holy Bible as a Base for a Potted Plant

On a shelf in our local pharmacy
A somewhat tattered Bible has reposed for years
And on that Bible is positioned a potted plant
And above them on the wall a cowboy cartoon

The iconography is elusive to me
One seeks for meaning in an assemblage:
So why this thing in this place at this time?
Existentially speaking (as we said in the ‘60s)
                        Why?

A curious piece of iconography
On a shelf in our local pharmacy

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

    Dag Hammarskjold  Negotiates with Himself and with God

                 Cf. Auden’s introduction to Vagmarken


          We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny
          but what we put into it is ours.

            Vagmarken (Markings), p. 55 in the 1965 Knopf edition


When you were a little child
If you attend a school named for Dag Hammarskjold
How long did it take you to learn to spell his name?

And you are now an adult
And blessed with Hammarskjold’s Vagmarken
How long did it take you to joy in his transcendent good?

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

                                         Front Toward Enemy

If
In what we may laughingly call real life
You can read these three words

                                     FRONT TOWARD ENEMY

You’re in the wrong place

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

          Binding Each Word with an Incantation, a Charm, a Spell

You. Not a generalized out-there “you” but – YOU

                                          Gentle Writer

A mysterious thought is dream’ed unto you
Or a conclusion sails from your observant mind

You take a pen of goose-quill carefully carved
You dip it into a horn or pottle of ink
Not a metaphorical inkhorn of floridity
But the horn of a beast, hollowed out
Stoppered with a fitted wooden plug
And charged with ink of a curious blue
Of minerals or dyes or the juice of berries boiled
And worked with pagan spells or Christian prayers

You take an expensive page of animal-skin
Worked out with scrapings and scrubbings and acids
Or perhaps imported sheets of Egyptian papyrus
(Against which some of the younger brethren sneer)

Remember the annual budget! Be careful, now!
Paper doesn’t grow on trees, you know!
(Well, you could argue about the papyrus)

You set the light just right, the sun or a lamp
The Altar is where candles glow in honor of Our Lord
(And then there’s the budget; candles are expensive)
So you must work with the sun or a tallow lamp
At a writing ***** angled as the amarius says

You think a thought
You lift your pen
With a prayer upon it
You guide it down
You write a word

A word

Each word is magic






What did you write?