Canada Day?  Just One?

With love from an ‘umble Yank

But every day is Canada Day!

The afternoon plane lands in Halifax
When the hatch is popped, cool air rushes in
Even the fog is happy in Canada

The Muskogee 1 never made landfall here
And so we pilgrimage for her, completing
Her voyage from ’42 to Canada

Wolfville, Grand Pre’, Le Grande Derangement
The Deportation Cross and beer cans
Well, God forgive the Redcoats anyway

Newfoundland
Is a bold
Anapest

The church spires in a line, the light is green
The bold young captain shoots the narrows wild
Can you find your way to your painted house?

To walk again the cobbles of Ferryland
And smell the very blue of the Atlantic
The sea-blown wind is cold in Canada

Blue Puttees and a mourning Caribou
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord
Good children sing “We love thee, Newfoundland”

Quebec – royal city of New France
May Le Bon Dieu bless the Plains of Abraham,
And may God bless
The signs an English driver cannot read

The Coca-Cola streets of Niagara Falls
Yanks laugh at made-in-China Mountie mugs
And buy them, happy to be in Canada

A cup of Toujours Frais from – well, that place
But to us in your southern provinces
Below Niagara, Tim too is Canada

Though Canada goes on, these scribbles must not –

Your grateful guest wishes only to say
That every happy day is Canada Day!

“…where a kelpie lived”

     “A little below the bridge was a pool where a kelpie lived.”

               -Sigrid Unset, Kristin Lavransdatter, p. 8

If you are blessed with a little back yard
The smallest of gardens, a bit of grass
Then you have pixies and fairies and sprites
They like you, but they’re awfully shy, you know

If in your garden there is a little pool
Even a dish of water for the cat
Then you have a tiny kelpie or two
(And they are much nicer than you’ve been told)

In flower and leaf and water and soft night air -
Oh, yes, there is sweet magic everywhere

The Sea-Road to Constantinople

                 For Tod on his Birthday

A coastal lugger wallows in the waves
Almost adrift in its poor steerageway
Slow-yawing northeast from the blue Aegean
Into the soft-murmuring Marmara.
Athens is in the past, and soon, ahead,
Constantinople’s walls will catch the dawn.
Our sticks, our packs, a space upon the deck
A book of verse, a cup, a spoon, a bowl,
Some prayers the priest was pleased to copy out
For us poor pilgrims who with weary feet
Were pleased to board a northbound boat at last
And rest through sunlit days with pipes alight
And words and prayers afloat among the sails,
Among the gulls that circle ‘round the mast.
All travelers pray for their hearts’ desires
To wait for them ashore at journey’s end;
For us, ours is to serve the Emperor -
A little further, there beyond the stars.

We do not burn books in America
We just ignore them, for we light our nights
And burn away our individual souls
Upon an altar green, clean plastic grass

Come together as one unto the lights
The concept of the tablets now writ large
An electronic scoreboard – and if we’re good
We’ll see our snaggly grins all ten feet tall

Eighty-thousand dollars of education
Beaming civilization six nights each year

The (beep) painting (beep) dates (beep, beep) from (beep)
Holbein’s (beep) first (beep) visit (beep) to (beep)
England (beep) oil on oak (beep) a (beep) golden
Tudor (beep) rose (beep) over his heart (beep)

The chain of office his aurea catena
Of faith in God and in his king (beep, beep)
Is (beep) the (beep) paper (beep) in (beep) his
Hands (beep) Averil (beep) Manchin’s (beep) petition?

Saint Thomas seems to look so far away –
Perhaps he sees beyond his martyrdom day




Except for the rhyming couplet I’m having a bit of fun here. The Holbein painting of St. Thomas More is beautiful (beep) in every way, and I am grateful for the opportunity to spend some time before it. The Tudors to Windsors: British Royal Portraits from Holbein to Warhol exhibition is brilliant as is everything the Houston Museum of Fine Arts does:  https://www.mfah.org/

Saint Thomas More, ora pro nos

A Carpenter’s Hammer

A craftsman does not hammer with a hammer -
He wields it with surprising subtlety
As delicately as a scalpel poised
Or as an artist’s most elegant brush

A hammer is balanced to mind and hand
Its journey planned and scheduled with great care
To bring about something that was not before:
Through muscle and thought it falls, it dives, it drives

And when the hammer strikes the waiting nail
It sings to Creation a workman's hymn

The manic pixie dream girl of my youth
Curving and tight, scampering along the beach
Her wild black hair flying about as she danced
Teasing all the boys with her sunlit joys

I read to her Rod McKuen by candlelight
While Joni Mitchell on the turntable mused
We played and smoked, and drank good screwcap wine
And played some more, and then she went away

And now - an old lady in a funeral home pew
And I’m not so sure of myself anymore


(“Manic pixie dream girl” is a neologism attributed to film critic Nathan Rubin)

Alienation is the constant theme
A child for whom the family dinner table
Is the scene of nightly interrogations
Can never be at home outside himself

Alienation is the constant theme
When every word is dissected by others
For any taint of beauty, love, or truth
And any deviation from today

Alienation is the constant theme
When trust is but a morning-broken dream

Expect no pity as you fall and fall
Weighed down by the medals you gave yourselves
Through your closed loops of self-congratulation
In your officers’ clubs and private planes

You led us from the sky and from the rear
Secure in air-conditioned bunkers sealed
Against pollution by heat and dust and rot
And the uncollected bodies of the dead

Expect no pity as you fall and fall
Weighed down by your accumulated wealth
Through your closed loops of self-congratulation
In boardrooms and governments and private planes

You sacrificed us for your resumes -
You’re out of single-malt; now go away

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                      A Ballerina Arrested for High Treason

                           Let them dance in praise of His name

                                                 -Psalm 150

A ballerina was arrested for high treason

And no wonder – dance is a beautiful thing
Whether the thunderous tread of a country line
Or the ethereal flights of Russian ballet
Dance is a joy, and so must be suppressed

A ballerina was arrested for high treason

A dancer moves to mysteries of her own
On an imperial stage in Saint Petersburg
Or barefoot in a meadow among butterflies
Dance is a joy, and must be controlled

A ballerina was arrested for high treason

In the street or in a moonlit fairies’ ring
Such wild wonder – dance is a dangerous thing!

A ballerina was arrested for high treason

Playin’ on the back porch, got an old dog
Chewed my toy car from the ten-cent store
Scared my dear momma with a green toad-frog
When she told my daddy I got my britches wore

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Early get the cows up, early off to school
Running up the lane to catch the yaller bus
Paddled by the principal for actin’ like a fool
Hours in the classroom hearin’ Teacher fuss

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Then in the afternoon to the locker room
With hardly any time for a ***** stop
Coach-Bubba’s rolling bassy voice of doom
Bellowing “I WANNA HEAR THE LEATHER POP!

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Runnin’ the roads in an old-timey Ford
A fifth of Jack Daniels underneath the seat
Stupidly standin’ on the running board
Singin’ to the radio, O so sweet!

(If you see a log truck you’ll have good luck)

Runnin’ the roads on graduation night
Well, hello, great big world, and here I am
They say I got to get a job now, sure, that’s right
Say, buddy, what’s this place called Viet-Nam?

But

If you see a log truck
                                       you’ll have
                                                             good luck

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com

Following a Path Worn by Pilgrims
                         -Doctor Zhivago, p. 75

No one is first along a pilgrim road
Other footsteps began our journey for us -
To Bethlehem, Emmaus, Damascus –
Wherever the heart is centered in hope

Someone has stepped on this cactus before
And sat on that rock to pull out the spines
And muttered about the indignity
Of a holy man pestered with stickers

But humility is part of the search

Because

No one is last along a pilgrim road

My dad was on Omaha Beach but he
didn’t talk much about it so now
I’m going to take the rest of the day
to tell you all that he didn’t much talk about
we broke the Enigma code yeah we did
you can always tell a real veteran by
his thousand-yard stare, yessir, I know stuff
we kicked the Germans’ butts but he didn’t talk
much about it if not for us the French
would be speaking German yeah man yeah
when I was in graduate school but he
didn’t talk much about it we saved the world
when I was in graduate school when I
saw Patton those liberals in academia
he had this thousand-yard stare them snowflakes
wouldn’t hit Omaha Beach now they’d be browning
their pants when I was in graduate school
but he didn’t talk much about it yeah
that M-1 was the best battle implement
ever devised I got me one and boy
it’s got some serious stopping power yessir
I just love to go out to the range and pop some caps
with that bad boy the French are cheese-eating
surrender monkeys we can’t depend on the Italians
but he didn’t talk much about it when I
was in graduate school thousand-yard stare
my dad was there he didn’t talk much about it
here is a youtube about it if only
those snowflakes would watch Patton they’d learn something
left-wing academia he didn’t talk much about it
when I was in graduate school yeah man
I seen it on Band of Brothers liberal elites
Macron Macron Macron first front second front
‘cause I know stuff I got a whole liberry
but he didn’t talk much about it if not
for us yeah you’d all be speaking German
we saved France’s **** when DeGaulle told us
he wanted all American soldiers out of France
we asked him if that included the thousands
of American soldiers in French cemeteries
and that sure shut him up ha ha ha
bet you never heard that before and then
there was these old veterans at the airport
and this Frenchy asked them for their passports
and this old man had to look for his
and this Frenchy asked this veteran if he
had been in France before and this veteran
said he had and then this Frenchy he said
then you know you need to have your passport
ready and this here old veteran said that he
was at Normandy and there wasn’t no Frenchies
to give it to and you could hear a pin drop
ha ha I bet you never heard that one before
When I was in graduate school when I
was on my gap year but he didn’t talk much about it
snowflake liberal elites in academia
I love me my AK-47 that son
spits out some serious lead but he didn’t
talk much about it…


Me? Like, I had this deferment, my feet,
but I know all about it ‘cause I watch John Wayne
and my dad was in it so I guess he ought to know
and he was in a real war; you were only in
like you know them A-rabs and stuff…

Beware the Odes of March (tho’ this is not really an ode)

or

In the Italian Kitchen with Brutus and Cassius

or

I Come to Curry Caesar, Not to Baste Him

Julius Caesar on the Ides
Marches to the senate house
Up to him young Brutus strides
And, too, Cassius (what a louse!)

Then mean Brutus takes his knife
So does Cassius; you know the ballad:
“Lettuce chop cold Caesar’s life
And thus create the Caesar salad!”

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

                           The Emperor’s New Kafka

When an insect woke up one morning he found
Himself changed into a politician
And thus gatekeeper to Das Schloss, key clam
Through whom all arrival applications must pass

All shipping boxes to be checked for ticks
In a village that cannot be surveyed
Unescorted thinkers may not be seated
At corner tables in the Herrenhof

Many are desperate to be admitted
But few are desperate to be committed

Speech of Freedom

I will listen – now tell me what you think
And tell me what you think, not what you feel
Not what you were commanded by bullhorns
Not chants beginning with “Hey! Hey!
     **! **!”

I will listen – now tell me that you think
You, not a crowd, a hive, a swarm, a shoal
You, not a mood, a whim, a committee
You, not a photocopied manifesto

Because I want to hear you – you, not echoes
I will listen – now tell me what you think

Manichaeism is Quite Wrong, You Know


“…without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then….”

                       -Ivan, The Brothers Karamazov

If there are no boundaries, there is no freedom
With nothing to push against, one’s strength must fail
If God is not, then one can make no plaints
And must take on a burden that can’t exist

If man is never told no, there is no Yes
For him to answer then against the no
And if there is no Yes, there is nothing at all
There is no dichotomy, only the Yes

If there are no boundaries, there is no Yes
And man must cease in silent nothingness

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

                     Fashionable Death Cults Then and Now

After the June 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union and Einsatzgruppe mass shootings of civilians, the Nazis experimented with gas vans for mass killing…

-Gassing Operations | Holocaust Encyclopedia (ushmm.org)

Dozens of migrants were found dead in an abandoned big rig in San Antonio on Monday in what appears to be the deadliest human smuggling case in modern U.S. history.


-At least 50 migrants found dead inside a truck in San Antonio, officials say (cnbc.com)

We have our death vans too, not well-organized
But rolling down the American road
Unseen by our leaders in their personal jets
Flying to Frisco or maybe Cancun

Bombings and shootings on the street and in church
Job lots in hospitals, by the dozens in schools
For we too specialize in genocide
And may Moloch and Herod bless our AR-15s

If any children survive, we’ll call them Generation Something
And tell them each day how inadequate they are

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.

Chaucer and the Lightendyten 1


“The Prologue” to The Canterbury Tales
Grinds from the photocopying machine
And thus the casual observer, he wails
That technology produces the scene

And yet good Chaucer wrote in the long ago
Rhymed rhythms to instruct and to delight
The copier came later, as you know -
Our pilgrim was the first these tales to write

Or was he?

So here is a problem, which I you begge:
Of which came first, the cicen or the egge?



1 There was of course no Middle English word for “photocopier” so I cobbled one together from “lighte,” to give light, and “endyte,” to write.  Chaucer said it was okay.

Cats and the Office of Prime

With the dignity of an abbess the cat
Enthrones herself upon the morning fence
To welcome with due solemn liturgies
The daily rising of the given sun

Her slow lavabo accomplished, she turns
Offering the peace of Cat to the assembly:
The lesser cats, the even lesser dogs
The night-chilled lawn, the dewy leaves, the light

She blinks her blessings there upon the day

     And all is complete

When happy children then come out to play

Click to make a gift

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Click to make a gift

My sadness, anger, and shame concrete plan
I will travel to Rome third-party reporting
Mechanisms examining specific
Options advocate concrete proposals

Click to make a gift

Expertise relevant disciplines need
Such tools already exist our structures
Must preclude criterion zero tolerance
Outreach psychological development

Click to make a gift

This is the church house, this is the steeple
Where the Bishop dumps words upon the people

Click to make a gift

X-treem card?
(Beep!) World Poker Tour card?
Credit card?
Debit card?
(BEEP!) Insert card now.
No, not that way, stupid!
Turn it around!
Would you like a receipt?
Why not?
What is your weight?
What is your (beep!) fate?
Would you like a free car wash?
Don’t talk to me like that –
I’m going to make you push some more buttons.
Push the “enter” button
which is cleverly (beep!) hidden
in a thicket of other buttons.
Oh, dear, you couldn’t find
The “enter” button in time!
Start over (Beep!) hahahahahahaha.
Gas went up ten cents a qallon since you got here.
There’s a motorcycle gang waiting behind you.
Impatiently.
Hurry!
You want air? (Beep!) Drive around back
And have your credit card ready.
Do you want water for your radiator?  Yes?
Arctic Mountain Springs?
Montana (Beep!) Mountain Springs?
Sierra Mountain Springs?
All-Natural Mountain Springs?
City water??????
Would you like to come inside
and buy (Beep!) cigarettes from a hefty country girl
with a mouth full of chewing tobacco?
No?
Lift handle and select…
COMPUTER ERROR
Please start over.

Our thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts and
Prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers are with
You our thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts
and prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers are

With you our thoughts and prayers are with you our
Thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers
Are with you our thoughts and prayers are with you
Our thoughts and prayers are with you our thoughts and

Prayers are with you our thoughts and prayers are with…
What thoughts? And what does any of that mean?

At dawn
               thunder rises and lightning falls
A black spot in middle of a road
Closer and closer – a wobbling black spot
A bicyclist unaware of the gods

Slow-pedaling through a nowhere of despair
A corpse, fragments of skin still on its bones
It turns and grins, a crewman on that ship
And in its veins that rotting albatross

At dawn
              grimacing through rotting-teeth breath
A wereling wobbling in existential death

As Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet did not say with his dying breath:

     No, 'tis not so deep as a Harvey, nor so wide as a
     Rita; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve.

“...Poisoned Chalice”

              -Macbeth I.vii.10-12

We commend each other with curses exchanged
Between a cop and a hard place in space
Red MAGA caps against ****** berets
All of these accessories China-made

Our battleground an asphalt parking lot
Our forward first-aid post a coffee shop
Where Communists glare over their nitros cold
And Fascists froth their frappuccinos hot

We commend each other with a chalice defiled
Over the broken body of a Child

No high school sophomore ever grew up without
A naked lady plastic ballpoint pen -
Those furtive giggles in geometry class
Are not about theorems all risqué

After the FFA trip to the rodeo
Or the band trip to sunny Galveston
A pretty lady with a 1940s do
Loses her swimsuit over and over again

Upend the pen, and she's nekkid in the sun -
Whoever thought writing could be such fun!

A Field Guide to Awkward Silences
The Norton Field Guide to Writing with Readings
A Field Guide to Secure Wi-Fi
A Field Guide to Asset Forfeiture
A Field Guide to “Fake News”
A Field Guide to Lies
A Field Guide to Antibiotic Stewardship in Outpatient Settings
A Field Guide to the Italian New Right
A Field Guide to Getting Lost
A Field Guide to Ripple Effects Mapping
A Field Guide to ****** and Fly Fishing
A Field Guide to Jerks at Work
A Field Guide to Bad Faith Arguments

And so it field guides, and so it field guides
As dear old Kurt Vonnegut did not say
And what field is the writer talking about?
About the farmer outstanding in his field?

Alas there is no field guide to writing
A title blessedly free of field guide
Which would be a feel-good fieldless guideless
For which humanity would be grateful

About as original as Keep Calm
Keep Calm and Say Something Original
Let the last field guide be Keep Calm about
A Field Guide to Burying Tired Cliches’

Hey, TeleCheck:

                                              T
     ­                                         H
                      ­                         I
                                         te  S  le

True Faith and Allegiance

A retired admiral peddles insurance to
“My fellow veterans,” still ripping off
The enlisted with bogus bonhomie
About how they all were merry shipmates

Retired generals ooze into something new
Suits for the business of dealing in souls
Souls bought and sold internationally
Where careless talk could cost discreet kickbacks

The surviving enlisted, wounded and sick,
Are doled out vouchers for a bus ride home

The

Authorities will shut them down again
Each in its turn: The Brick, the Stray Dog Cafe,
Foxy John’s (Beer Wine Good Food Low Prices),
Cafe’ Zanzibar, Joe’s Eats down by the piers

And Denny’s past, before the blood-crazed purge
Exiled us scribbling hippies to the street
To search again and build again a space
Where verbs and nouns and smoke are flung about

Because we are colonialists of the heart
Who build up empires of beauty and truth



http://www.visit-petersburg.ru/en/restaurant/196278/

There are no days free of panic attacks -
A fierce determination to recusancy
Is no defense against the men of peace
Clenching their fists and screaming out their love

There are no nights free of panic attacks -
A fierce determination to needful sleep
Is no defense against unhappy dreams
Judicial accusations of the memory

But even panic is no defense against
One’s fierce determination to write the truth

Aliens Foreign and Domestic

A little Ford bearing on its bumper
A made-in-China South Vietnamese flag
Tailgated by a menacing larger Ford
Which passes, bearing on its bumper
A made-in-China Confederate flag
And then another Ford with an image of
Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
On U.S. 96 near the Wal-Mart -
There must be something in all that
    But what?

If you annoy a Sicilian woman
She will fling herself at you shrieking,
Her hair and eyes wild with rage; she’ll plunge a dagger
Into your heart three times before you fall

And then she’ll spit on your corpse and curse your memory

If you annoy a French woman
She will fling at you a stiletto heel
Or a saucepan (with sauce veloute’, oui!)
Either one will take you down, mon ami

And then she’ll dial a friend for company

If you annoy a Russian woman
She will make a discreet telephone call
And when in spring the ice of the Neva thaws
Your frozen body will at last pop up

And then she’ll write a poem in your memory

If you annoy an English woman
She will smile sweetly, and poison your tea
And as you collapse, gasping desperately for breath
She will smile again, and ask if anything’s wrong

And then she’ll ring for Jeeves to tidy up

Finally:

A Canadian woman  (I’m telling no tales) -
You mess with her, and you’re bait for the whales!

                               -fin- (so to speak)

Mid Watch, But Without a Watch

Guarding an empty clothesline until four
With Springfield rifle at right shoulder arms
And sometimes something else: left shoulder arms
Because some NCO is sure to pass

And yelp about the proper rifle carry;
Until he does, the solitude is sweet
The San Diego night all damp and still
The recruit thinks and dreams, but dare not speak

While being trained for combat in Viet-Nam
Guarding an empty clothesline in the night

But Yevtushenko...

                      A tribute to Penguin paperbacks

When they
Someday
Take us away
For reading
For thinking
For writing

Those Penguin paperbacks all tattered and taped
Discovered when they empty our pockets
          Will
Be used against us in their courts of law

But Yevtushenko might corrupt our jailers

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

                                   For the Good of the Republic

                               To the Caesars and their Generals
        (But not to the Senate; they have made themselves irrelevant)

Illustris:

You have medals and money and country estates
Book deals and bank accounts and pleasure gardens
You can retire in soft luxury now -
Your military contractors have seen to that

The Rubicon is ruby with your soldiers’ blood
And the Tiber is stopped with the loyal dead
Who fell upon your sword-sharp signatures -
And now you conspire against each other

You have done enough; go home to your musicians
Your receptions, your hunting parties, your…wives
You could pray for the dead
But you won’t

Still,

If you love your nation you will not meet
At the Milvian Bridge

In stately conclave met 1, each in his chair
The board of school trustees arrange their notes
And after an approved, appropriate prayer
They nod in their wisdom, then “aye” their votes

Entrusted with the dear, sweet children’s learning
With attendance down and the taxes up
The trustees feel a deep and mystical yearning
To make your child p*ss in a plastic cup

History, literature – what need of these?
(Make sure the valedictorian pees)

1 Chesterton

I was just passing through
You didn’t know me; I didn’t know you
But I should have known you’d steal from me
When you told me to Have a Blessed Day

You never came back with the change
And that is sad. We have come to accept the lies
Of praychurs, presidents, and prime ministers
But one expects better of Sonic waitresses

And  you told me to Have a Blessed Day

So you’re 40 cents to the bad, that’s true
But I’ve got the dollar I was going to tip you

And, hey, y’all have a blessed day, y’hear?


(May God bless her for really-real; generational poverty sees things differently, and, anyway, she may have learned it from the 501C3 preacher-man.)

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com


                                     August is a Yellow Flame


                          “That August was like a yellow flame”

                    Anna Ahkmatova, 1917 / Anno Domini MCMXXI /
                                       III. The Voice of Memory


This August is indeed like a yellow flame
Death writhes among brown-burnt withering leaves
The grass is as sere as Macbeth’s acrid soul
And garden hoses drip in futility

The sun-bleached visage of Ozymandias
Might frown upon this blighted desert wrack
For not unlike the Ancient Mariner’s ghostly crew
The usages of summer drop and decay

But look!

But look above the last barren clouds in the west -
A tiny sliver of the promising moon

Pupils Fixed and Dilated

He was not permitted to die in peace
The only mercy granted was release
From fear, and mortars falling from the sky
There was no possibility of saying goodbye
And the river water stank, as did the night
His end was as flickering as the light
Pale gaspings, a fluttering pulse, dead sweat
D5W, battle dressings, and yet
The only mercy was in his release
He was not permitted to die in peace

Upon Reading a Patronizing Review of Ferlinghetti’s Delightful and Revelatory Entertainment, Little Boy



The only problem with the Proletariat
Is obeying the pretentious ***** that
Insist on calling us the Proletariat -

Resist their Insist!

For I will not be labeled by some artsy-crat

Maybe the Prisoner was Already Dead

     “...he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.”

                               -George Orwell, “A Hanging”

Evening. Maybe he was already dead
Dead long before the State boys strapped him down
And a functionary started an I.V. drip
Left arm? Or right? In a cinder-block room

Fluorescent lights

With windowed faces posted on both sides
Testaments to the protocols of death
The liturgy of falling away because
He and the lads murdered a helpless man

Fluorescent lights

He breathed. And then he didn’t. His bowels let go
And did they put a Band-Aid on the wound?

Fluorescent lights

But now

Let’s go outside and feel the wind

                                                           ­      We live

A space casino painted on its sides
Its airbrakes hissing and spitting against the wheels
The charter bus clanks to a ***** stop
Its hatches open to discharge aliens

Optimistically rattling their walkers
And dragging their oxygen machines along
Spongy shoes challenged by the parking lot
Knobby white knees all rattling through the dawn

The moustache in his cool gas-station shades
Admires himself in the big West Coast mirror

Tears of Saint Lawrence

The tears of Saint Lawrence fall by the hour
Fall from the cosmos as our good saint weeps
Silently for us through those smoky nights
When hope seems but a burning mockery

The tears of Saint Lawrence remind us of
Certain promises made in the long-ago
That all would be well, and rainbows and rain
And refreshing streams are all part of them

The tears of Saint Lawrence fall, gently fall
As if our dreams were being baptized too

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

Pilgrimage Along The A1

For all DeBeauvilles, Beauvilles, Bevilles, and Bevils Everywhere

From Peterborough drops a road
Across the Fens, into the past
(Where wary wraiths still wear the woad);
It comes to Chesterton at last.

And we will walk along that track,
Or hop a bus, perhaps; you know
How hard it is to sling a pack
When one is sixty-old, and slow.

That mapped blue line across our land
Follows along a Roman way
Where Hereward the Wake made stand
In mists where secret islands lay.

In Chesterton a Norman tower
Beside Saint Michael’s guards the fields;
Though clockless, still it counts slow hours
And centuries long hidden and sealed.

And there before a looted tomb,
Long bare of candles, flowers, and prayers,
We will in our poor Latin resume
Aves for old de Beauville’s cares.

Swamp the Drain

Now once upon a time there was a drain
A happy little drain that all day drained
Which is the nature of what good drains do
Letting things flow away, off to the sea

One day a blustering bullfrog strutted about
And croaked that the drain was not any good
He said he’d swamp that drain with a huuuuge dam
A beautiful dam – his audience was riveted

And he croaked and he croaked and still he croaked
                                                 ­                all day
But the happy little drain drained his croaks
                                                                ­ away

The Secret That THEY Don’t Want You to Know

The secret that your banker, car dealer
Doctor, insurance agent, mechanic
Dentist, electrician, wireless service
Neighborhood Russian spy, travel agent

Hairdresser, ophthalmologist, plumber
Lawyer, barber, grocer, parole officer
Pharmacist, barista, pedicurist
Watchmaker, stockbroker, cable installer

Or county agricultural agent
Doesn’t want you to know:
                                                   wait…what was it…?