Ash Wednesday in Libya

For Anthony Germain of the CBC

The wisdom of the desert is dispersed
Among the industrial monuments
To mechanized ******, wireless chaos,
And war-**** for touch-screen degenerates

On this Ash Wednesday night while smoky flares
Obscure, with false, flickering fumes, the stars
God sent to dance above those ancient lands,
You choke and weep among the ashes of

More victims of pale Herod’s shopping trips.
So of your kindness grant that we, your friends,
May wear your ashes for you on this night,
For you, a truth-teller among the liars,

And for the weary innocents who flee
The ashes of their burnt and blasted world

Midwatch and Matins - Recruit Training, San Diego

In youth

Awakened by another sailor, one stands
A sleepy watch, leggings and dungarees,
A Springfield rifle at right-shoulder arms,
A-yawn, awash in midnight fog to guard
A clothesline of national importance

In age

Brought now to sudden weary wakefulness
By those eternal mysteries we muse,
Bereft by noisy day’s false comforts, we
Begin the nocturnal lessons of truth
Because some nights we must stand watch again.

The Library of Alexandria in Our Seabags

…in the army…(e)very few days one seemed to meet a scholar, an original, a poet, a cheery buffoon, a raconteur, or at the very least a man of good will.”

-C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

The barracks was our university
So too the march, the camp, the line for chow
McKuen shared our ham and lima beans
John Steinbeck helped with cleaning guns and gear

(You’re not supposed to call your rifle a gun)

The Muses Nine were usually given a miss
But not Max Brand or Herman Wouk
Cowboys and hobbits and hippie poets
And a suspicious Russian or two

Tattered paperbacks jammed into our pockets:
All the world was our university

Remembrance Day / Veterans' Day - 2

Would You Like a Downgrade?

I.  
“Everything I own I’m carrying on my back,”
A shipmate said wonderingly that last day
In the recruit barracks.  And it was so:
Two sets of dungarees, one pair of shoes,
Two sets of Undress Blue and then one set
Of Dress Blue B, one pair of sneaks, one pair
Of this, more sets of that, a ditty bag
Of Personal Hygiene Articles,
Officially and carefully approved,
All in a new seabag.
                                       It was enough.
How much does a man need in order to die?

II.
And now we carry mortgages, jobs, books,
Televisions, cars, hunting rifles, clocks,
Lawnmowers, bills, Sunday suits, Monday shoes,
Plastic boxes that light up and make noise,
Fences that need repair, cats to the vet,
Air conditioners, chainsaws, queen-sized beds,
Closets that need sorting out, chests of drawers
Of things we never needed anyway,
Cameras, clawhammers, pens, reading lamps,
Scissors, and writing paper.
                                                   It is too much.
How much does a man need in order to live?

Remembrance Day / Veterans' Day - 3

Bad Morning, Viet-Nam

No music calls a teenager to war;
There is no American Bandstand of death,
No bugles sound a glorious John Wayne charge
For corpses floating down the Vam Co Tay

No rockin’ sounds for all the bodies bagged
No “Gerry Owen” to accompany
Obscene screams in the hot, rain-rotting night.
Bullets do not ****.  Mortars do not crump.

There is no rattle of musketry.
The racket and the horror are concussive.
Men – boys, really – do not choose to die,
“Willingly sacrifice their lives,” that lie;

They just writhe in blood, on a gunboat deck
Painted to Navy specifications.

Come Laughing Home at Twilight

Beaumont-Hamel, 1916

And, O!  Wasn’t he just the Jack the Lad,
A’swellin’ down the Water Street as if –
As if he owned the very paving stones!
He was my beautiful boy, and, sure,
The girls they thought so too: his eyes, his walk;
A man of Newfoundland, my small big man,
Just seventeen, but strong and bold and sure.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

Don’t tell me he was England’s finest, no –
He was my finest, him and his Da,
His Da, who breathed in sorrow, and was lost,
They say, lost in the fog, among the ice.
But no, he too was killed on the first of July
Only it took him months to cast away,
And drift away, far away, in the mist.

Where is he now?  Can you tell me?  Can you?

I need no kings nor no Kaisers, no,
Nor no statues with fine words writ on’em,
Nor no flags nor no Last Post today:
I only want to see my men come home,
Come laughing home at twilight, boots all mucky,
An’ me fussin’ at ‘em for being’ late,
Come laughing home at twilight...

Ever England

Brave Hurricanes and Spits still claw and climb
Far up into the English summer sky
At the lingering end of a golden time
As wild young lads and aging empires die

The Hood and Rodney still the Channel guard
Against the strident Men of Destiny
Then shellfire falls; the helm is over hard
But the brave old ships keep the Narrow Sea

Dear Grandpa and the boys sport thin tin hats
In Sunday afternoon’s invasion drill
Gram says he’s too ****** old for all of that
But she too smells the smoke of Abbeville

Faith does not pass with ephemeral time:
Brave Hurricanes and Spits still claw and climb

Something About Life


Strelnikov: “What will you do in Varykino?”
Yuri: “Live.  Just live.”

-Doctor Zhivago

The plane lifted, and the cheering was wild
And at that happy moment the pilot said
“We are now clear of Vietnamese
Territorial waters.”  There was joy,
Even wilder cheering for most, and quiet
Joy for a few.  For one, Karamazov
To hand, peace, and infinite gratitude.
“I’m alive,” he said to himself and to God,
“Alive.  I will live, after all.”  To read, to write,
Simply to live.  Not for revolution,
Whose smoke poisons the air, not for the war,
Not to withdraw into that crippling self-pity
Which is the most evil lotus of all,
But to live.  To read, to write.
                                            But death comes,
Then up the Vam Co Tay, or now in bed,
Or bleeding in a frozen February ditch;
Death comes, scorning our frail, feeble, failing
      flesh,
But silent then at the edge of the grave,
For all graves will be empty, not in the end,
But in the very beginning of all.

If Wars were Subject
to Copyright

If wars were subject to a copyright -
Then candidates would have to pay a fee
Each time they appeal to the glorious past
When standing for the election, the proceeds
To fall like ****** manna on the dead
Who can never cash the checks anyway

If wars were subject to a copyright -
Then Hollywood movies should pay their dues
Whenever a bold-scripted commando,
Body-waxed muscles glistening with makeup,
Advances up Hamburger-Helper Hill
With a patriotic song on his lipstick

If wars were subject to a copyright –
The generals’ memoirs, the admirals’, too,
Would pay to lighten the blighted young lives
Of soul-fragmented lads whose pain and blood
Gave the air-conditioned another star
And unctuous applause at the officers’ club

If wars were subject to a copyright -
The President would have to pay his bill
Each time he banged the lectern for a war,
The glorious dux bellorum dux-ing
From the rear, while a squadron of pigs fly
Above, powered by pixie-dust and dreams

V: Have you ever experienced deja-vu?
R: I remember someone asking me that.

“Render unto Caesar…”

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Let us render unto the Caesars
Our sons and daughters for undeclared wars
Each death excused with a telephone call
Each death another medal for a general

Let us render unto the Caesars
Our children for the pleasures of the rich
Each death and shattered heart excused as art
Each death a tribute to some rich man’s lust

Each leader, each Somebody, takes and takes –
They then dismiss their victims as snowflakes

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

                                     ­             Renegades

They sell themselves as precious Renegades
Two ossified establishment millionaires
As desperately cool as Nehru jackets
But don’t you fail to mind their copyrights

Renegades

Trademarks, podcasts, deluxe signed editions
They’re, like, authentic ‘n’ stuff, for a price
In carefully edited openness
They feel your pain and your credit card

Renegades

They wear suit coats with their collars open
How awesomely workin’ class hip is that!

Renegades

Reptilian Whisperings

Ipse *** caro sit reservat iram, et propitiationem petit a Deo: quis exorabit pro delictis illius?

He that is but flesh, nourisheth anger, and doth he ask forgiveness of God?  who shall obtain pardon for his sins?

-Ecclesiasticus 28:5

Like Cleopatra’s asp they want to cuddle
Against one’s heart: resentments slithering
About, indignities, enormities
Demanding incessant indulgences

Their reptilian whisperings hissering
Self-pity, inverted self-spiraling,
In closing, falling, dying loops until
Nothing is left even to pity itself

They are writhing about us even now -
Like Cleopatra’s asp they want to cuddle

One should never regret coming away
From any crowd, and certainly not now:
Their loving voices are raised in chants of hate
And their funny hats aren’t funny at all

Their ultimate freedom is the freedom to
Obey with love the loudest loving leader
Who twists their supplicant hands to fists of love
For beating harmony into us all

One will never regret coming away
From any crowd, and certainly not today

To Propagandists of All Flavors in All Nations

Sometimes my work is joyful, sometimes sad
Sometimes my work is good, more often bad -
But never does it belong to you, comrade.

Re-Reading Tolkien for Lent

Across the page, across the words, soft light
Soft morning light at play this quiet day
This stand-down day when duty does not call
Not call, and life is for a few hours free

Ink on a page, now forming into songs
Songs that were old when this green world was new
And fields of flowers were as fields of stars
Fields of Creation and eternal Hope

O happy fields forever, here, right here
Across the page, across the words, soft light

Restless Hope Syndrome

At two in the morning the great ideas
Are fluttering shadows on the moonlit lawn
The old clock clanks, the new clock hums, and hours
Are an accusation against one’s works

At three in the morning one’s ambitions
Are not even shadows as the moon sails on
The old clock clanks, the new clock hums, and hopes
Crowd around the bed in disappointment

At four in the morning the silent noise
Begins withdrawing before the stale new day

German refugee husband: “Liebchen – sweetness – what watch?”

German refugee wife: “Ten watch.”

Husband: “Such watch?”

Carl the Bartender: “You will get along beautifully in America.”

                                      -Casablanca

I­ check the time on my retirement watch
(A Seiko; they did not think much of me)
And consider that there is no time at all
Unless Creation is some sort of clock

Childhood is watchless, timeless, careless, free
But adults must be catalogued and timed:
Bulova, Timex, Rolex, and Longines
And even a railway Regulator

I check the time on my retirement watch -
And hustle off to my chapter two job

What a surprise
It sparks, it dies
Return the prize
To those false guys

It wouldn’t fit
I thought a bit
Then stepped on it
And so it fit

A fuzzy structure there beside the road -
It proves to be the rib cage of the dead
Which nights before enclosed the heart and lungs
Of a creature on its errands dutiful

Gone now to buzzards and bacterial decay
On this, neither the Road to Damascus
Nor to Emmaus, and the Good Samaritan
Could have done nothing had he come along

It sinks into the dust, and so will we
Beneath the tire-treads of mortality

Well, yes, there are wings, right wings and left wings -
If a bird is missing a wing, right or left
It cannot fly, it cannot lift away
From the cat-haunted lawn, and so is eaten

There are water-wings, and buffalo wings
(Although buffalo don’t really have wings)
And in the cafeteria chicken-ring-things
And other metaphors that just won’t fly

But you and I, we both belong to God
And not to a wing (that would be quite odd)

Road Breakfast

Greasy spoons are a little too clean these days
After the sweet incense of cigarette smoke
Was purged by a Vatican II of health
Along with the morning paper. It’s all

Plastic tablets and gourmet coffees now
Multi-colored packets of chemicals
Flatware in little cellophane envelopes
Bright cartoon tees instead of stained work shirts

Cross-trainers where muddy boots used to rest -
Greasy spoons are just too d**d clean these days

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

                       Robin Hood and Jacques Derrida

As the first stars came out above the leaves
Of Merry Sherwood, the lads in peaceful repose
Put away their after-supper mending of gear
And idled over their ale of October brewing

Then Robin Hood spoke to Allan-a-Dale:

Don’t sing to us of Neo-Post-Colonial White Supremacist Patriarchal People-of-Color Matriarchal LGBTQTY Non-Binary Feminist Chomskian Existentialist (existentialist – how quaint) Hegelian Post-Structuralist Logocentric Sausurian Psychoanalytical Post-Modern Marxist Jungian New Critical Cognitive Scientific Neo-Anarchic Canon-Repudiationist Neo-Informalist Catarrhic De-Constructionism.

Sing to us
                                                       a story.

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 soft, sweet 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 men’s needs
And tell God’s Mysteries daily on our beads

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

      Robinson Crusoe Orders a Generator from Amazon.com

Another hurricane, warning or watch
One forgets which while clearing off the lawns
Of chairs and toys and all the summer dreams
And giving the generator its monthly run

In practiced unison we again recite
The liturgies of flashlight batteries
Bottled water, paper plates, and plastic sporks
And Meals-Ready-To-Eat, though they really aren’t

Another hurricane, warning or watch -
And maybe just an inch or two of Scotch

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

                               Rod McKuen at a Garage Sale

We don’t know who Baby ****** and Tommie were
They sent each other notes and underlines
And colored slips of paper from page to page
In Someone’s Shadow (“Hardbacks 25 Cents”)

The exuberance of adolescent arcs
Reminds us of our long-ago callow youth
When we thought we had discovered something
In secretly sharing free verse in home room

And we had – indulging in forbidden lines
Is still good therapy for being sixteen

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                Romance of the Boeing 707

                                     Out on Runway Number 9
                                     Big 707 set to go

                                           -Gordon Lightfoot

Old Ginsberg wrote that the typewriter was holy
An airport of words for coming and going
On a runway of ribbon, platen, and keys
McKuen might have said it’s a safe place to land

But then came the Boeing 707
Dear Gordon Lightfoot’s silver wings on high
It flew our words and us all over the world
And became for us holy in its own way

The 707 – there was nothing finer
But the last one I saw was a roadside diner

Rosaries might be like ball-point pens
A souvenir for you from Brighton Beach
Fabrique en Chine, blessed by the Bishop of Rome
A kind thought from gap years and honeymoons

But now those rosaries and ball-point pens
Repose in stasis beneath your Sunday socks
And the handkerchiefs Mee-Maw monogrammed
In silk for your high school graduation

Go find them
(No, no, not the socks or handkerchiefs...)

Words flung onto paper are gifts of light
And so are Aves whispered in the night

Rule 2: Don’t Write Poetry about Poetry

A poem is a magic looking-glass
In which you see others, and not yourself
And search it for veiled possibilities
This mirror for the needs of –
                                                        not yourself

When you tap-tap to push pixels about
Or set in place a line of ink and hope
Into a meaning that you have perceived
It is a bedesman’s prayer for –
                                                     not yourself

A poem is a magic-measured song
That helps make sense of life for –
                                                     not yourself

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                      Runes Recently Discovered

We have mysterious runic messages still
Appearing this morning – there, on the road – see them?
Some say these irregular scrawls mark utilities
But you know, there are Wee Folk in these woods

Russian Children on Christmas Eve

Good children dress warmly to watch for the star
The star of Bethlehem, the shepherds’ star
The star of the magi, true-guiding star
And more than all of these, the children’s star

If children fall asleep during the Royal Hours
It is fitting and just; they too are royal,
Princes and princesses of the Emperor
And of that Child who in the manger slept

Then home to kutya, and so to their beds -
The Saviour blesses all dear little sleepyheads!

S rozhdyestvom Hristovym!

I read lots of Russian lit (in translation, of course) while in Viet-Nam

I understood poor, young Raskolnikov
And read all I found by Anton Chekhov
Remembered nothing about Bulgakhov
Heard naughty whispers about Nabokov
Thrilled to the Cossacks in old Sholokov
And then I learned about Kalashnikov –
This, I decided, is where I get off!



Moc Hoa (pronounced something like “mock wah”) is a now-prosperous town on the Song Vam Co Tay near the border with Cambodia.  In 1970 it was rather down at the heels and was a center of military activity, including mercenaries presumably controlled by the C.I.A*.

For Our Special Prosecutors,
Who Guard and Guide Us

Oh, borscht!  Those pesky Russkies under my bed
Were marching around all night, changing my votes
Beaming mysterious rays through my sleepy head
And snooping through my lesson plans and notes

They programmed my radio with Marx and Lenin
Plastered a poster of Putin to my wall
Sailed Admiral Kuznetzov across my linen
Layered a Petrograd accent over my Texas drawl

The special prosecutor says no further discussions –
Everything’s the fault of those perfidious Russians!

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                  Sacrifice in a Low Place

                                           Cf. 1 Kings 3

I would go to a high place and sacrifice to God
But there is no high place; this is an alluvial plain
Dark with conifers except along the sloughs
Dark in their own ways with cypress and oak

And I am old, too old to be a prophet
And I have often asked for all the wrong things
So I will take those things into the dark
And leave them at the foot of a pagan oak

I will learn the statutes from the whisperings
I will go into the quiet, and listen for God

Saharan Dust

The sky is a visitor from Africa
Come all the way to the Americas
To say hello, and bless these skies awhile
With a hemispheric umbrella pearl-grey

How like an overcast of dreams it seems
Shielding the land away from the summer heat
Shading the green into an all-day dusk
Almost iridescent in glowing layers

The sun will return soon, but for now
The sky is a visitor from Africa

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                                 Sailing a Couch into History

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

                         -Dag Hammarskjold, Markings, p. 51

Through eating, fatting, sleeping, video games
En couchant in a stasis ossified
By the low expectations of the zeitgeist
(“What’s a zeitgeist?”) some flail into history

The ironic echoes of Call of Duty
Flatten against an empty ‘tater-chip bag        
Yesterday flung into the baby’s crib
(“Ain’t no one seen little Shawnee today?”)

His MePhone case is manly hunter green
He's checkin’ out the fantasies on a glowing screen

When you sigh, tucked cozily beneath my arm
Are you thinking of a lover in the past
That worthy youth who was the first to sail
With you out into that wider, wilder sea?

How vain of me to wish that I had been
that sailor, how foolish, for here you are -
I think you’re laughing at me, and well you should
Are you as happy to be here as I am?

Growing old was not part of my master plan
The sea and I are both old now, but you –

                                 You are forever young

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

                  Saint Augustine’s Stolen Apples, My Dead ‘Possum

Saint Augustine reflected on the sins of his youth
The stolen apples especially bothered him
In his life-long penance and his quest for truth
That memory, somehow, was especially grim

As for me I remember a long-ago night
When I flung a dead ‘possum at Miss Cates’ door
I know that such a thing just isn’t right
But she was mean and old (maybe twenty-four)

Saint Augustine’s sins hung about him like weights
And I –
I don’t feel bad about tormenting Miss Cates!

Saint Blaise

Waiting in line to have body parts blessed
Is probably a good idea, and throats
Are more accessible than pancreases
(Or are they pancreai?). A brain-blessing

Might be an even better idea, although
A small priest could not, would not reach so high
Hands, shoulders, elbows, noses, ear lobes too
So in the end (but blessing that might be

Entirely inappropriate) you see

Even so

Let us be blessed in all humility

Every daughter is born of royalty
To rule and serve in lineal descent from God
But Claudia from her island of mist
Was borne away to Rome in captive shame

With her father in chains, herself in chains
To speak for their people, to speak for peace
Before the emperor, who in hearing them
Gave freedom to himself, and a crown to her

Though hostage far away from her girlhood home
With love she captured imperial Rome

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

                         Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Thuringen,
                               and Today’s Staff Announcements

While walking through her hospital corridors
One pauses to bow before her bas-relief
All lovingly worked out in silver and gilt:
The Wartburg, and her mantle with roses and bread

These and the shy young Landgravine herself
Half-hidden behind announcements for this and that
Which in her humility she would not mind -
Her mission is to the invisible poor

The administration keeps her pretty much ignored -
Such is the mission of a modern hospital board

Saint Francis is depicted in fine art
In great museums and in modest homes -
And you can find him too, down at Wal-Mart,
Between the plastic frogs and concrete gnomes

Saint Garden Gnome

An obscure barefoot friar in Italy
Long labored in the Perugian sun,
Heaped rocks upon rocks, and then other rocks,
Up to a wavery roof of broken tiles,
Repairing with his bleeding hands God’s church

Then, better known – it wasn’t his fault – this friar,
With others in love with Lady Poverty,
In hope and penance trudged to far-off Rome
To offer there his modest Rule of life,
Repairing with his mindful words God’s Church

Along the delta of the steaming Nile
He waved away the worried pickets, crossed
Into the camp of the Saracens
Preaching Christ to merciful Al-Kamil,
Offering with a martyr’s heart God’s Faith

Saint Francis is depicted in fine art
In great museums and in modest homes -
And you can find him too, down at Wal-Mart,
Between the plastic frogs and concrete gnomes.

The whole city is full of it – in the squares,
The coffee shops, the ‘blogs, the op-ed pieces
The emails, the news sites, the grocery stores
They are all busy arguing -

If you ask someone to give you change
He says the President is the Begotten One
If you inquire about the price of a croissant
You are told by way of reply that he is not

That the Supreme Court is greater, and that
The President is inferior; if you ask
“Is my cup of Blue Mountain ready?”
The barista answers that Congress is nothing

In the squares, the coffee shops, the ‘blogs,
The op-ed pieces – the whole city is full of it

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
Fellowship & Fairydust (fellowshipandfairydust.com)
https://hellopoetry.com/lawrence-hall/
poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

                                     Saint Joseph and Ice Cream

             “I thought I heard you saying it was a pity…I never had any
              children…But I have, you know…Thousands of ’em …
              thousands of ’em…”

                                      -Goodbye, Mr. Chips

                           In memory of a happy summer morning
                           with Abbie and Alexander in Ottawa

Every man is a father after the Order of Saint Joseph
Every child is his to nurture and protect
A man must practice wisdom and honor
In order to pass them on to a new generation

And there is something to be said for ice cream -
I was entrusted with two little children
For a walkabout around Parliament Hill
“And give them nutritious snacks,” their mother enjoined

Most strictly enjoined

I asked myself what good Saint Joseph would do -
Surely he would buy them an ice cream each

And it was so
And now you know

Saint Joseph in a dreary winter night
Took to himself a newborn not his own,
Who yet is always his, the Child of Light
Whose crib Saint Joseph knew to be a throne

Saint Joseph shows men truth: each child is ours,
Adopted by each good man upon birth;
True fatherhood ordained in starlit hours
And ratified in Heaven and on earth.

Saint Joseph is the man who looked into
The eyes of Mary in her happy youth;
This strong man looked into her eyes and knew
She bore within her all eternal Truth.

Our witness is Saint Joseph, ever just:
God calls each man to take each child in trust.

Saint Joseph the Just

for every man

Saint Joseph in a dreary winter night
Took to himself a Newborn not his own
Yet who is always his, the Child of Light
Whose crib Saint Joseph knew to be a throne

Saint Joseph shows men truth: each child is ours
Adopted by each good man upon birth
True fatherhood ordained in starlit hours
And ratified in Heaven and on earth

Saint Joseph is the man who looked into
The eyes of Mary in her happy youth
This strong man looked into her eyes and knew
She bore within her all eternal Truth

Our witness is Saint Joseph, ever just:
God calls each man to take each child in trust

Saint Mary Magdalene’s Recycled Mobile ‘Phone

Her ‘phone was passed on to a parish priest
But they forgot to change the numbers and so
Her client-base kept telephoning him
At night, when the moon and the johns were full

“Confessions on Friday evening at seven”
Didn’t ring-a-ding anyone’s ding-ding
Maybe the lonely men in lonely rooms
Remembered then what their dear mamas said

And maybe they didn’t – life falls apart
Both in the street and at the Airport Inn

For Anna Akhmatova

Oh, we have strolled the winter avenues
Of the great Czar’s queen city of the North
And argued about Pushkin, over tea,
Great cups of tea in noisy little shops

Where at each table sat a poet or two
With pocket-wrinkled sheets of wild new verse
Set out like armies in desperate defense
Of the holy soil of the Motherland

Yes, we have strolled along the frozen Neva
In dream-bearing Aurora’s sacred light