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

                   Portrait of Monsieur Gaudry and His Daughter

                           For all Daughters and Their Fathers

Monsieur is dressed for a quiet evening at home
As is his daughter in her cozy white wrap
Leaning dutifully upon his shoulder as he predicts
With globe and maps the empires of her mind

The empires of her mind which she will rule
With subtle wit and work instead of war
With armies of thought and beauty and art and truth
To conquer chaos and set the world aright

She's a guardian of goodness in a little girl’s guise
(But inwardly, I think, she’s rolling her eyes)




“The Geography Lesson,” Louis-Leopold Boilly, 1812, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

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

                                     Each Kiss is a Distraction

While we weren’t watching
They might have declared war on Canada
We’d better check around

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

                                    Watching the Rain Without You

The rain is incomplete without you
If you were here we could sit on the couch
I’d put a Frank Sinatra on the machine
So he and the rain could sing to us

But especially to you

The rain is incomplete without you
If you were here we could lie on the floor
As I read the funny papers to you
And do you like good ol’ Charlie Brown?

But of course you do

The rain is incomplete without you
It misses you almost as much as I

Almost

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

                                          My Shakespearean Girl

I woke in sadness that the dream had passed
But joyed that the vision had come at all              
To comfort me with happy memories cast
Into my sleep through moonlight on the wall

Through moonlight on the wall, through starlit sky
That long-ago world in our golden youth
When she danced as lightly as a butterfly
Through sunlit fields where all was truth

Through sunlit fields on her little bare feet
As gracefully as a leaping summer fawn
Or rhyme and meter when in verse they meet
In that magic hour whence breathes the dawn

In that magic hour we were once more
So very close to that opening door…

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

                                       The Graveyard Shift

At two in the morning everything is old
The hours, the work, the fluorescent lights
The air, the night, flickering computer screens
Even the freshly-made coffee in the break room

At two in the morning everything is old
The way the new guy snuffles his dripping nose
The cleaning lady’s mop bucket and its rattling roll
The snoopervisor’s totally fake good cheer

At two in the morning everything is old
“You’ll love the fellowship on graveyards,” I was told

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

                       A Penny Saved is a Worthless Zinc Disc
                                 Gathering Dust in a Drawer


                          “Feed the birds, tuppounds a bag…”

                               -as Mary Poppins did not sing


It seems that our last penny has been spent
We will miss the fakey copper glint
Our other ***-metal coinage should take the hint:
We do not have a stable governMINT

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

                              Where Do Tariffs Go When They Die?


   “I have no window with which to look into another man’s soul.”

     Attributed to Saint Thomas More, Queen Elizabeth I, and others


And what do tariffs do while they are alive
If a Canadian cow ambles through a broken fence
And then gives birth on the south side of the wire
Can the calf claim birthright citizenship

                    (Did you hear about the bow-legged cowgirl
                    who couldn’t get her calves together?)

I have no window for looking into the soul of a cow
That is, if a cow can have a soul
Or aluminum / aluminium
Or pig iron (probably not made from real pigs)

                     (Or the clueless cowboy who wore a pig iron on his hip?)

We add 25% to this taxable cow
So that peace and justice return right now

                    (Just put down Canada and no one will get hurt)