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

                                  Good Neighbors Make Good Fences


                                         As Robert Frost did not say


I’d like to know

What pocket knife he carries for his daily chores
The pen with which he writes his shopping lists
The poetry he reads when out of doors
And how he really feels about September mists

But beyond all that, I want no knowledge of
His first marriage, the price of his new car
Which direction he faces when making love
The distance from here to the second nearest star

Because

A more important distance is that between friends
Slightly obscure through a diffuser lens

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


                                          And Your Word Is…?


                                          “The word is given!”

                  -John Derek as Joshua in The Ten Commandments


When all have gone to bed

You slip quietly into your room
And sit at a table bare of everything
Except for a solitary candle
A pen, a sheet of paper, a bottle of ink

You then write down your day, your acta diurnalis
Every action and thought, every glance and breath
Every hope, every failure, every fear
Every little victory savoured with delight

In only a word, a word, a glowing word –
What is that Word?

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

A repost from March, 2018


                     Yes, Yes, But They Need Jobs in the Real World


                   “Forward Electronics, your victory’s achieved!
                    In all communication, progress is our creed!
                    Ignorance is darkness, technology is light!
                    Radio, our watchword; radio, our might!”

          -Komsomol youth singing in “For the Good of the Cause,”
           Solzhenitsyn, 1963


The plans for your construction are precise
The design and engineering are true
The foundations solid, the drains are laid
In mathematics pure, infallible

The offices are bright with light, well-aired
The flow of work geometrically set
The shops and stores convenient to the staff
In tactical practicalities placed

But do you wonder, at night, beneath your lamp -
Why are you building a concentration camp?

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

       (Written several days before the events of 24-25 March 2025)

                                The Brass-Elevator Mountaineer


                                        A weak imitation of

                                         Osip Mandelstam

                      Of whom let us pray, “Memory eternal”


Our lives no longer sense truth around them
In our ewails we are afraid of each other’s words

But whenever there’s an eye-rolled whisper
It’s about the brass-elevator mountaineer

The ten tiny worms of his fingers
His words like mountains of loot

The waving tendrils atop his head
The glitter of his shiny Tesla

Wheels stained with a **** of groveling bosses
He toys with the tributes of his house pets:

One clenches his fisties
Another salutes
A third pledges eternal loyalty

He pokes out his fingers and grabs ‘em by their _

He magic-markers mass deportations:
Three hundred or more for El Salvador
A hundred or so for Guantanamo
Uncounted hundreds to disappear
From routine check-ins here

“Your search has returned zero (0) matching records”

He rolls the possibilities of _ ___ on his tongue like diet sodas
He wishes he could deport his former best friends forever

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

                                 The Helices of Life and Death

A helix is continuity and connectedness
The wanderings of perceptions and realities
Following pilgrim paths and the flights of birds
As art eternal celebrated in awe

A double helix is said to diagram life
DNA spinning and winding around
Receiving signals from the ultimate Truth
And resolving themselves into the mystery of you

A single helix of barbed wire shining in the sun
Constricts around its victims, denying them breath

Denying them

Denying

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

                  Who is the Third Murderer in Macbeth?


                         But who did bid thee join with us?

                                        -Macbeth III.iii.1


Two murderers are hired; a third one joins
The false lady, perhaps, or the tempter himself
As light and love both thicken near the rooky wood
“But who did bid thee join…?” Maybe we did

We have drooped and drowsed through civilization
Scorning the sacred texts of our several faiths
Approaching the Altar as a drive-through concession
The Body of Christ and maybe an order of fries

Who is the Third Murderer?
                                                        Rabbi, is it I?

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

                     Did Civilians Write Poetry Back in the Day?

A medical professional, while taking my pulse
Asked me what I was reading
                                                 Poetry, I replied
Poetry of suffering in the Second World War
Most of it by civilians who were there

She asked:

Did civilians write poetry back in th’ day?

I changed the topic to my blood pressure



Second World War Poems
Ed. Hugh Haughton
London: Faber and Faber, 2004

This anthology is brilliant, with poems by soldiers, civilians, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from many nations. Several of the poems are anonymous, written on scraps of paper found on the bodies of the murdered. There is much fashionable babble about my voice / our voices / authentic voices / my people’s voices, and so on, but here is a fine collection by people whose voices were desperate to tell the truth, not indulge in self-pity, and find beauty among the horror