Jackboots

Exactly what are jackboots, eh? Tell me.
Well, jackboots were designed by this guy, Jack,
You see, because jacksneakers didn’t work
And jackloafers were out of the question

Jack wanted a boot everyone could hate
Even though they didn’t know what it was
And so anyone you don’t like wears jackboots
You polish them nicely with vitriol

Available at finer shops everywhere
And you’re a Facist…Facsit…Fascist, dude!

The cold told a tale to me
the rain suggested poems
                                     another tale the winds brought
                                     the sea’s billows drove;
                                     the birds added words
                                     the treetops phrases

                        -The Kalevala, I, “In the Beginning” 1

We’re born to light and water and earth and air
Yet most of my life I cared little for verse,
But somehow words have become wonderful,
Even beloved because poetry -

- Poetry takes the chaos (or apparent chaos?)
Of life, and gently sings it into meaning
Through line, stanza, meter, and metaphor,
Shapes it, loves it, and makes it beautiful.

Poetry is like baptism, perhaps,
Or painting, sculpting, drawing, making music,
Or digging and setting a post-hole just right,
Helping set one’s perceptions of reality just right

And it is beautiful




1 The Kalevala. Elias Lonnrot. Trans. Keith Bosley. An Oxford World’s Classics Paperback.  OUP. New York. 1989.

Articles on how to write always feature
Pictures of old Underwoods, and maybe
A cup of pencils to the side, and some flowers
In a vase, wilting symbolically

One longs to sees images of an Apple II
Or maybe a TI994A
A battered Radio Shack TRS80
Cursors flickering in defiance

A Magnavox Videowriter, loading slow -
The 80s had their Nobel dreams too, you know

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                               I Don’t Miss Working on the Farm

The hay balers are out early in the fields
Headlights outshining late September stars
The din of diesel engines shaking the world
I don’t miss working on the farm at all

The operator smoking a cigarette
While his sunburnt old hands wrestle the machine
His khakis and chambray shirt already wet
I don’t miss working on the farm at all

Yep, laboring in the fields from can ‘til can’t -
I don’t miss working on the farm at all

Neither a Menshevik nor a Bolshevik Be

                                     What is’t you do?
                           A deed without a name.

                                 -Macbeth IV.1.48-49

This is not a matter of recusancy
To wish a blessing on your houses both
That in the Grace of God you amend yourselves -
But go away and do it somewhere else

And take with you your posings and your twootings
Your alligator shoes, expense accounts
Your plastic soldiers all saluting you
And your designer plots of great import

And leave good folk alone to their good work
With sweat-stained hands in clean domestic peace

For us there is no Stray Dog Cabaret -
Our art burns at the end of a welding rod
And in the muscled turning of a wrench
In heat and sweat against a frozen bolt

Old work trucks parked in an oyster shell lot
Eaten with rust from the chemical air
And past the gates, cracking units, and tanks
A plywood paradise with ice-cold beer

Some of us work the night shift to pay our way
Through college, where we learn that we are

                                                             privileged

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

                          This Unit Not Labeled for Retail Sale

You can’t break me apart, she said to me
This unit is not labeled for retail sale
And if you think that you like what you see
You can post your money for the emotional bail

Paleo-Yuppies at Work and Play

Fading slowly from the existential struggle,
Waving their MePhones about in protest,
They swarm to Starbuck’s for adjective coffees,
Uniformed in knee-pants and bulbous sneaks
And Chinese soccer tops with little checkmarks,
Their graduate degrees at parade rest,
And in confusion, suddenly-stalled careers
Raging against the thirty-something machine.
Not trusting anyone under forty,
They rustle their foam cups and resumes’
Instead of suspicious Democrats,
And demand promotions and Perrier.
They mourn pinstripes and leather briefcases,
And the old floppy disc of yesteryear,
And fumble their PowerPoint Presentations
Tho’ once they illuminated the world
With colored markers on glossy whiteboard.
They no longer play games on a Commodore
Or rock to neo-Carib fusion jazz;
Their Rush is Right baseball caps are now filed
In trays of antique curiosities
Beside the moldering hippie stuff shelved
In an adjunct of the Smithsonian
Where curricula vitae go to be eaten
By a computer virus named Vlad.
Now, as the sun sets on Ferris Bueller’s day
They count and verify their MeBook friends -
They did not change the world, not at all, but
The world changed anyway, and without them,
And in the end they love neither Jesus
Nor The Force; like Eve, they bow to an Apple.

Cinder Block State University Resists the Occupation

Our social change internal journey to
Diversity student coordinator
Studying art facilitating a
Safe space internally generate student

Dreams of diversity dreaming diversity
Art Installation students will write their
Dreams on pieces of fabric and paper
To help guide students to their dreams the general

Path to diversity student coordinator
It’s complicated project individual

Poets Without Boudoirs

Je suis occupy #hashtag support us
Resistance transcultural support us
Committee manifesto support us
Ministry of culture, yes, support us

Empowerment crucial space support us
Initiatives nonprofit support us
Weaves a layered tapestry support us
Conceptual identity support us

Fresh new voices unflinching support us
Iambs are oppressivist support us

What Child is this WHOP!  WHEEP! WHOP! WHEEP! WHOP!  WHEEP! WHOP! WHEEP! WHOP!  WHEEP! WHOP! WHEEP! WHOP!  WHEEP! WHOP!
WHEEP!...
In Mary’s lap is sleeping…

“It’s okay, folks; it was just the muffins.”

Whom angels greet…
                                          “I don’t want a muffin, thanks.”
With anthems sweet…

A cookery show with noshes and gnaws -
People giving a ‘burger rounds of applause

The Farmer to Saint Swithin

O good Saint Swithin, please, to you we pray,
On this your high-summer rain-making day –
Of your blest kindness send us sweet, soft showers,
The kind that gently fall for hours and hours,

To heal the sunburnt land of thirst and drought
And nourish the corn that sees the winter out;
And if you grant the boon we humbly ask
We’ll work the harder on each rural task:

We’ll ditch and fence and plough, and milk the cow,
Share with the widder-folk, and feed the sow,
Count out some plantful seeds for poor folks’ needs,
And daily tell God’s Mysteries on our beads.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                      While Clenching Their Fisties

Old men do not now argue politics
At the coffee table in the grocery store
Old men, like some university students
Simply say what they are ordered to say

By voices bellowing from Orwellian telescreens

While clenching their Trumpy-grumpy fisties

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

         Convention: Day 4 – A Workshop in Obedience Training

[This doggerel is recyclable and may be employed in both the Republican and Democrat conventions.]

The cult formed obediently for his look-at-me show
Where every response was a fist and a cheer
He didn’t tell his sycophants what they needed to know
But only what he wanted them to hear

(pretend this is centered) Autumn Leaf

                 for a dear friend who died  in the night

O may her life close like a leaf that falls
And laughs in falling at its happy end
Air-dancing through a sky of Dresden blue
Sun-sliding sideways in a blithesome breeze

Soft-singing in a sweet sinopian sun
Who smiles grandfatherly on each blest leaf
Remembering its spring, and summer too
Pushed from the wood after the last fell frost

To grow from mother-tree and taste the air
In that Apollonian sun of youth
To work and play in Saturnian summer
And then to glow in ripe Pomona’s dusk

In celebration of all life, and then
At last to leap into eternity

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com


                            The Last American Westclox Baby Ben

                                                         (Maybe)


It ticked into my heart at the Goodwill store
Two dollars’ worth of Americana
A charmer in a battered metal shell
Hiding behind a tired plastic face

The tick, the tock, the talk of Peru, Illinois
The clock that woke America each dawn
For work and study, and to meet the Chicago train
For a century until time ran out

It clicks and clanks and ticks and tocks and talks

All-day dutiful hands, a jangling bell -
How long will this old clock last?

Only time will tell

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

502 Bad Gateway
____________
nginx/1.1.19

Dear Friends,

This has been fun, but with the late changes I can make nothing of the HelloPoetry site.  If I can manage to submit this, please know that you can continue to read my scribblings on my own poorly-accomplished – but functional – site, Reactionary Drivel at reactionarydrivel.blogspot.com.  It’s not really reactionary, tho’ it’s often drivel!  And if you will send me the name of your site, I will follow you there.

Cheers,

Lawrence


Good-bye, Poetry?

Oh, Eliot, what has happened to your wonderful site
Your gift of poetry to a suffering world?
Did some Morlock in an unhappy hour
Break into spring to make it winter again?

Who has torn and scattered the pages
And thus obscured the words so carefully shaped
By the fugitive keepers of dreams
Who seek for them again in the wilderness?

There once was a workshop for poor scribblers –
A studio of dreams – may it be restored!



Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Cat

for Calvin

Yes, surely there will be another cat
But not this Cat, not this Big Orange Dust-Mop
Lounging “with abs of steel and *** appeal”
At his window, hungry for hummingbirds

Or lurking there behind that door to swat
His Sarah, who served as his household staff,
For failing to render due obeisance
To him, the superior MagnifiCat

Dear Calvin –

For now, farewell, until that better World,
O happy, leaping, loving childhood friend

Like vultures hovering over the faithful dead
The rank red rags of base repression hung
Upon the blast-breeched walls of captive Rome;
The smoke of conquest fouled the ancient streets
While mocking conquerors marched their betters
At the point of enlightened bayonets
To the scientific future, murdering those
Who bore themselves with quiet dignity

False, sinister Savoy sneered in disdain
At ancient truths, this costumed reprobate
Who played at soldier once the firing ceased
And claimed Saint Peter’s patrimony on
The corpses of the merely useful who
With this day’s slogans fresh upon their lips
At dawn advanced upon the remnant walls
So thinly held by so the last faithful few

And thus befeathered fat Vittorio
Was given his victory by better men
On both sides there, their corpses looted by
The pallid inheritors of Progress
The son of a Sardinian spurred his horse
Along the streets of now obedient Rome
And to the Quirinal by a passage broad
And finally to the Ardeatine Caves

In the work cart I find a luna moth
And is it dead?  With gentle hands I lift…
And off it flies! into the sunlit leaves
Breeze-wavy in the pale September sun

          Among the apple and cherry and oak

I labor away at summer’s excess
And clear the paths and glades of weatherfall
Sorting out litter to a merry fire
And billets to store for the winter hearth

          Sweet gifts of apple and cherry and oak

The bees seem to wonder what I’m about
Sitting awhile, and thinking the summer out

          Beneath the apple and cherry and oak

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

                                  Their Candles are All Out


                            “…There’s husbandry in heaven;
                              Their candles are all out...”

                                              -Macbeth II.i.6-7


Good men will tend to see the good in all
When Banquo was aware of the starless night
He saw in that not a lack of light  
But rather the careful conservation of light

And so we see this night, this rainy night
Not as a time of cold and darkness and damp
But an occasion for hearth-gathering the family
For cards, chess, read-alouds, blankies, warmth, peace

Good men will tend to see the good in all
And good must then on all of us befall

Strelnikov is still Wrong

"I used to admire your poetry…I shouldn't admire it now. I should find it absurdly personal. Don't you agree? Feelings, insights, affections...it's suddenly trivial now. You don't agree; you're wrong. The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it."

– Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago (film)

Don’t write to be approved by masters who
Wear Rolexes in the Name of the People
Don’t write to be approved by masters at all
But be your own authority and see

Your life – yours - is nobler than manifestos
The latest noisy Ghibellines and Guelphs
All Power to the Constituent Assembly
One folk, one nation, one waffle with syrup

Write freedom through verses, and disobey
Anyone who pushes you what to say

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

Former President Trump Splits Two Infinitives and Botches a Number of Subject, Verb, and Adjective Constructs While Proposing the Arming of Teachers

    “...it's time to finally allow highly trained teachers to safely and
     discreetly concealed carry, let them concealed carry.”

                      -Former President Donald J. Trump
                    to the National Rifle ***., 27 May 2022

All teachers trample the Constitution
All teachers promote contempt for the Flag
All teachers should be in an institution
All teachers are weird (and that one’s a fxg)
All teachers despise the military
All teachers should be slowly microwaved
All teachers hate meat; they’re vegetary
All teachers hate Jesus; they can’t be saved
All teachers are evil; the children are harmed:

And thus, they say, all teachers should be armed

Previously published as “Texas’ Proposed Concealed Carry Law” in Dispatches from the Colonial Office, 2018, available from amazon.com.

A brave little man with a shopping bag
Defiantly stood before an army tank
A foul machine designed to grind free men
Into ****** scraps to be hosed away

Two unknown men - it was not the tank that stopped
It was the tank commander who stopped the tank
All that is left is old videotape:
Two bullets made all problems disappear

A brave little man with a shopping bag
Another brave man with a battle tank:

They stopped -
                              And, yes, someday China will be free

Alter Christus, Alter Vir*

For Reverend Angelo J. Liteky

He died three times, for other men
Who lived because he died – once in Indochina
Once in his vocation, and one last time
Forgotten in a poor hospital bed

Soul-wounded in the false, incessant wars
Humanity inflicts upon itself
Fallenness falling again, ever fallen
And the ever-falling fell upon him

Though he lifted his love - always for others -
He died again – and who will live for him?

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                        The War on Books

          The war on books, codified by Stalin’s functionaries
          at the Soviet Writers’ Conference in 1934 and ruthlessly
          waged by the secret police for the following fifty years,
          was finally coming to an end, and Zhivago’s insurgent
          guerrillas were winning.

                             -Duncan White, Cold Warriors:
                    Writers Who Waged the Literary Cold war

What books will America purge this week -
What childhood adventures, what scholarly works
What entertainments of an idle hour
Will be forbidden to us in this Land of the Free?

We pray that nations blessed with liberty
Will smuggle books to us, stories and poems
With innocent ideas that give delight
And in their innocence threaten tyrants

What books will America purge this week –
And when did we become afraid of ideas?

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                               A Child’s Garden of Worse(s)

                   Some poets wrote verses which were not meant
                   to charm the reader but to get them a Stalin prize.

                  -Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, 1963

The children who are permitted to live
Are not permitted to read what they want
When they ask for adventures our censors give
Ideology, instead of a jaunt

The children who are not submissive to the code
Not following this week’s fashions in science
Or who presume to kick against the goad
Will be inclusively loved into compliance

And from the Hippocrene a taste, a drink?
Oh, no! Children are now forbidden to dream or think

Trapped in the Coffee Shop of Lingering Death

He knows everything about every war
Because although he never went to one
He had good friends who did, and they told him
All about it, and about Patton, so there

He knows all about Jesus, and, like, stuff
The Templar tunnels beneath the Pentagon
The Seal of Solomon found on Oak Island
And Mexico’s lost Tribe of Israel, so there

Which can lead the unsaved to tell a lie:
“Oh, gosh, I have to rush, I forgot about…”

So there.

Lawrence Hall HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                       Book Removal Training

                   The orange flames waved at the crowd as paper and
                   print dissolved inside them. Burning words were torn
                   from their sentences.

                                       -The Book Thief, p. 112

And now burning words must be torn from free people
For if people read they might think about things:
Why does the Party’s Jesus hate everyone
And why are weapons superior to ideas?

Can a hangperson’s noose teach us to love
Burning crosses comfort a frightened child
Why do the cult’s censors fly our flag upside down
While stealing books from our children’s hands?

A state that trains people to purge library books
Is a slave state



Florida revises school library book removal training after public outcry
Story by Douglas Soule, USA TODAY NETWORK

Florida revises school library book removal training after public outcry (msn.com)

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                         Are We Looking Through Sauron’s Eye?

Through our glowing palantiri we watch
Dark images, shadowy and flickering
Ghostly men gathered around machines –
Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?

A silent flash, and structure disappears
Enveloped in blackness and liquid flame
Arcing bits of metal and bits of men -
Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?

Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?
And is that eye now turned on us?
A poem is itself.

Your Grace, you cannot be a common man
There are no common men - but there are men
And in their service, wearily, alone
You now must bear their mitre and their ring

Your Grace, please do not dine with the regime
They’re only using you, laughing at you
Nor with the blessed poor – you’ll slurp your soup
And they deserve better company anyway

Your Grace, you must completely humble yourself
Submitting even to being addressed as “Your Grace”

The Social MePhone Justice Commandos of Toxic Doom

In the unending quest for social justice
Schoolroom shootings, unisex bakeries
Tornados, a steak, a snake, get off the plane
They’re all the same to the Omigod cult:

“Omigod Omigod Omigod O
Migod Omigod Omigod Omi
God Omigod Omigod Omigod
Omigod Omigod Omigod O!

“Chapsnat bookface tubeyou my relationship
It’s complicated Omigod Omi”

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                     ­         Communities

We often read about communities:

The intelligence community
The black community
The LGBT community
The arts community

Communities

The Hispanic community
The white community
The evangelical community
The educational community

Communities

One imagines a community:
Volunteer fire department, VFW
Parks, shops, a Methodist church across the street
From Our Lady of Guadalupe

Communities

But communities seem mostly to be
Lonely people stereotyping others
On the InterGossip with big ol’ words

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                         A Lucky Dachshund’s Foot

Luna-Dog sat with a stick in her jaws
The sort of thing a little dachshund gnaws
(chewing everything is one of a puppy’s laws)
But a look in her eyes gave me some pause –

It wasn’t a stick; it was one of a bunny’s paws!

Yuck.

Time for church.

                                                      -The End-

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                         Are We Looking Through Sauron’s Eye?

Through our glowing palantiri we watch
Dark images, shadowy and flickering
Ghostly men gathered around machines –
Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?

A silent flash, and structure disappears
Enveloped in blackness and liquid flame
Arcing bits of metal and bits of men -
Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?

Are we looking through Sauron’s eye?
And is that eye now turned on us?

His battered old laptop slung across his back
That famous laptop with the sticker that reads
In font Albertus “This Machine Kills Haters”
He poses rustically on a railway line

His happenin’ hipster hat pulled ‘way down low
Over the deep-souled Eyes That Have Seen It All
While his slender, artistic fingers seem
To flutter in search of existential truth

(Or maybe two forms of identification)

While off camera a cop writes him a ticket
For trespassing on railway property

Our straw boss, now, she hyphenates her name
And there is something frightening about
Those faux dashes stapled between the nouns
Her proper nouns, as if they might slip loose

And fall onto the pages of Debrett’s
As isolated bits of DNA
Dropping their aitches and their gees, oh, please!
So tack that Burberry hyphen back again

Let no proletarian taint be seen -
Made in China becomes Fabrique en Chine

Alexander Pushkin and the Poker-Playing Dogs

We can have our Pushkin, all thinky and sad
And our poker-playing pups, cheating at cards
Ruslan and Ludmylla dancing on ice
At the Houston airport Holiday Inn

Did Pushkin paint the poker-playing pups
Or carve tetrameters while in his cups?
That green baize poker table, a samovar
And the Big Giant Head, who needs an ace

We can have our Pushkin, all thinky and sad
And too those kitschy dogs, being real bad!

If the Russians Find Out That the Iced Tea was Bugged

If the Russians find out that the iced tea
Was bugged they may well conclude that Area 51
Has tested Tom Brady’s jersey which was stowed
In a bus station locker in Donetsk

With the claim check issued to Kellyanne Conway
And passed to a North Korean operative via
A secret drop in a hollow pumpkin
Behind a voting machine in Spokane

That was hacked by a rogue albino nun
Carrying secret numbers for Rand Paul

On a Morning in June – a Doctor Seuss-Free Graduation Poem

The earth is all before me: with a heart
Joyous, nor scar’d at its own liberty,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way.

- Wordsworth, Prelude, I.15-19

Soon you’ll depart for your own pilgrimage,
Seafaring through the life God has given you,
To the golden Canterbury of your heart,
Along the sunlit road you’ve chosen to walk,
A pilgrimage, perhaps, to Orwell’s dusty room,
Or deep into the mind of Thomas More
Or far-off Saint James of the Field of Stars,
Or sea-passages swift to Denmark’s shores,
Or fields of sonnets singing in the dawn -
All these you’ll find along your pilgrim road.

Take then, your haversack, and neatly pack
Your book, your song, your dream, a change of clothes
(Your dreams are happier when you wear dry socks)
A prayer that your parsoun will write for you
A cup, a bowl, a pocketknife, a pen;
And do take care to pack those useful words
Learned, shaped, and sharpened, polished from your youth:
The baby-sounds for supper, sandwich, cat,
The childhood sounds for play and your best friend,
Then words from Mom and words from books - and words from you.

Words flown by you in dreams like sunlit sails
Then shaped again in pencil or in ink
And flung in hope upon a waiting leaf
Words made by you for honest purposes
And never employed in wicked deceit,
For thieves might steal your book, your song, your hopes,
And time decay your purposes and strength
But your own words, oh, yes, your good, strong words,
Like an old pair of boots will see you through
To your heart’s desire at your journey’s end.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                Let’s go for Coffee -- Grab Your Flak Jacket

Some give their sons semi-automatics and hate
Instead of family and purpose and love
Instead of guided study and structured faith
Instead of fishing poles and summer afternoons

Raggedy barefoot children in the five and dime
With a Saturday morning quarter each
Plastic toy soldiers, Nazis and Yanks
Or a wind-up car – but that’s a dollar

Whitman adventure books for fifty cents
If nothing this week, then maybe the next
The Call of the Wild, with noble dog Buck
But what about marbles in a little net bag?

Tables of treasures at the variety store
Aladdin’s Cave (with a swept wooden floor)

When the kitchen staff did the washing-up
They could not but notice, among the bowls
And serviettes, spoons, knives, pitchers, and plates,
One of the best silver trays, blotchy with blood

And scraps of vertebrae, ruining the shine
“Oh, bother; these stains will never come out,”
Muttered the old woman in charge of such things
But she scrubbed and polished, did a good job

With that and with each costly silver cup
When the kitchen staff did the washing-up

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                   Keats Helps Carry a Cat to the Veterinarian

          [I]f Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree
                                 it had better not come at all

             -John Keats, Letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818 1

The leaves come naturally from the trees today
As autumn floats away, onto the pages of life
Memories set down, one word at a time
Or phrases scribbled in heart-leaping haste

But in humility the poor poet perceives
That lines often don’t come naturally at all
Resisting as fiercely as hissing cats
Being crated for a trip to the vet

No

Poetry doesn’t come as easily as all that -
Come, Mr. Keats, and help me with this cat!


1 John Keats – "Keats's Axioms" -- Letter to John Taylor, February 27, 1818 | Genius

Today is also Valentine’s, and so
For the schoolchildren little candy hearts
As we remember from our happy youth
Teenagers like them still, and so they should

Now lessons follow: the four elements
Of Anglo-Saxon poetry, history
Chemistry, a turn in the auto shop:
Yeats’ happy “ceremonies of innocence”

And in the afternoon, Mass, and ashes,
And the cleaners tidy up candy wrappers

                             Instead of corpses

The Admiral Who Tells the Youth of America to Make Up Their Beds

One is pleased to note that an admiral
A brave example of American exceptionalism
Who commands emails and fleets and his resume’
Possesses the skill to make up his bed
Give him another shiny medal for that
That should keep him amused and out of your way

A sailor and a monk must make their beds
At Reveille and Matins, dutifully
Subject to obedience under oath
For tidying up is a liturgical act
Each act in its own small way leading to
That one great Way of God’s eternal love

But if you’re not a sailor or a monk
You may well be blessed with a lover to kiss
A dog to pet, a child to love, a cup
Of coffee to be embraced passionately
Make celebrating the dawn with indolence
Your oath of obedience to needful things

Mussed pillows are fine for laying down your head
So
Disobey the admiral – don‘t make up your bed.

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                 On Reading a Poem by Du Mu

Everything is far away
China is ever so far away
The dynasties are far away
A golden dragon might fly us there

The moon is across the river
The blue-black river in the mist
A fishing boat is tied to the gate
The water-gate of our inn

What do they mean, the moon and boat?
Maybe the moon and the boat mean nothing
They simply are; they are themselves
Or perhaps we mean the moon and boat

Because of Du Mu and his words
The moon and the boat are forever
The blue-black river is forever
In reading of them so are we



“A Night at the Inn While Travelling”
Three Hundred Tang Poems
Translated by Peter Harris
London: Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets, 2009

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                         Those Who Stereotype “These Professors”

                                                   Exodus 20:16

These professors

Dr. Moriarty was a PFC on certain Pacific islands
Who could bayonet an enemy
Clear a jammed machine gun under fire
See his pals blown to pieces next to him
And work out subtle textual analyses

These professors

Dr. Chambers was a retired colonel of Marines
A natty little man in blazer and bowtie
Who could bayonet an enemy
See his pals blown to pieces next to him
Deconstruct the minutiae of energy distribution
And toss a foul-mouthed football player out on his sorry ***

These professors

Dr. Dale was a butcher until his thirties
When he entered college for the first time
He knew your hamburger from the outside in
The economics of building a business
He probably could have bench-pressed a Ford Fiesta
And when he spoke of Wordsworth, Keats, and Coleridge
You could feel the air of The Lake Country

These professors

“These professors” were complete men
Strong in war and word and wisdom and work
Unlike envious Unferths who learn life only second-hand
                    From Fox News and John Wayne movies
                    And closed loops of echoing InterGossip sites

From A Liturgy for the Emperor

We believe in God's holy empire too,
Byzantium, eternally golden
The Red-Apple Tree in the eastern sun
The City that echoes with laughing light
Through memory and history and beyond.
We believe in God and His Emperor,
And we believe that in the absence of
The Emperor, even then we must be
The Emperor's subjects, stubborn and true,
Wherever God has chosen to send us.
We then must rule our passions and our hearts,
Tend our gardens as if they were Eden --
Because they are -- and care for our children
As if angels were visiting tonight,
Until our God restores our Emperor,
Restores His City where the Earth-halves meet,
And finally, some day, some happy day,
Returns Himself to sit and rule enthroned
In His Three Romes, and in Jerusalem

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com  
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                          Putting All the Hearts Back Together

A child who takes a clock apart to see
Just how it works can easily be forgiven

Someone who takes a heart apart to see
Just how that works is justly unforgiven