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"You see us as you want to see us. In the simplest terms, in the most convenient definitions. But what we found out is that …
Cloudy, Muddy, Looking for Stones
Poems
Lawrence Hall
Aug 2018
I.
“No doubt they’ll sing in tune after the Revolution.”
-Kamarovsky, Doctor Zhivago (film)
Everyone seems to clench his fist these days
In solidarity with ephemera
While setting fire to green recycling bins
Hurling someone else’s bicycle through a window
Armed with their undergraduate degrees
The comrades liberate a coffee shop
Wifi-ing the revolution of the day
Empowerment by beating love to death
Loudsplaining authentic victimization
Posing for selfies with a stolen ‘phone
II.
Their inhumanity seemed a marvel of class-consciousness, their barbarism a model of proletarian firmness…
-Doctor Zhivago, p. 349
Everyone seems to clutch his flag these days
In solidarity with a past that wasn’t
While setting fire to misspelled cardboard signs
Hurling someone else’s beer into a crowd
Armed with their lurid Confederate tats
The Something.Right liberate a dumpster
Bull-horning the counter-revolution
Empowerment by beating love to death
Bellowing their Reconquista of stench
Posing behind their cheap gas station shades
III.
“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…”
-Strelnikov to Yuri, Doctor Zhivago (film)
Some few embrace civilization these days
In solidarity with humanity
While lighting one small candle as a votive
Whispering an Ave into the Light
Armed with wonder through pen and flute and brush
Recusants choose the liberation given
In singing of the eternal verities
Self-empowerment happily denied
With love, with poetry, music, and art
Celebrating life on this summer day
“No doubt they’ll sing in tune after the Revolution.”
-Kamarovsky, Doctor Zhivago (film)
Everyone seems to clench his fist these days
In solidarity with ephemera
While setting fire to green recycling bins
Hurling someone else’s bicycle through a window
Armed with their undergraduate degrees
The comrades liberate a coffee shop
Wifi-ing the revolution of the day
Empowerment by beating love to death
Loudsplaining authentic victimization
Posing for selfies with a stolen ‘phone
II.
Their inhumanity seemed a marvel of class-consciousness, their barbarism a model of proletarian firmness…
-Doctor Zhivago, p. 349
Everyone seems to clutch his flag these days
In solidarity with a past that wasn’t
While setting fire to misspelled cardboard signs
Hurling someone else’s beer into a crowd
Armed with their lurid Confederate tats
The Something.Right liberate a dumpster
Bull-horning the counter-revolution
Empowerment by beating love to death
Bellowing their Reconquista of stench
Posing behind their cheap gas station shades
III.
“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…”
-Strelnikov to Yuri, Doctor Zhivago (film)
Some few embrace civilization these days
In solidarity with humanity
While lighting one small candle as a votive
Whispering an Ave into the Light
Armed with wonder through pen and flute and brush
Recusants choose the liberation given
In singing of the eternal verities
Self-empowerment happily denied
With love, with poetry, music, and art
Celebrating life on this summer day
Lawrence Hall
Jul 13
Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Macbeth, Doctor Zhivago, Captain Call, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Allen Ginsberg, and Rod McKuen Visit the Dentist but Have to Wait for Beowulf's Root Canal
In gratitude for all the wonderful dentists, hygienists, and
technicians who keep us chewing!
Macbeth Visits the Dentist
Is this a drill which I see before me
The whirring drill outstretched to my teeth
O happiest gas! Come let me clutch thee!
Before my body I throw my dental shield
Dr. Zhivago Visits the Dentist
Poor dental hygiene is for crowds of mediocrities
Only individuals seek dentistry
And they shun those who tolerate bad teeth
How many things in the world deserve our loyalty?
A dentist whose papers are in order
Captain Call Visits the Dentist
Call saw that the dentist was looking at him
The nitrous oxide drained out of him
Leaving him feeling tired
“I hate a bad tooth. I won’t tolerate it.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko Visits the Dentist
For a tooth to come out
Some of the pain must be devoted to Stalin
Soviet dentistry demanded happy endings
I knew I could floss and brush better than Mayakovsky
Bella’s teeth were second only to those of Akhmatova
Only I could make Babi Yar all about me and my teeth
When I saw a dentist in Zima Junction
I saw the truth of the Revolution in her little mirror
Allen Ginsberg Visits the Dentist
I saw the best teeth of my generation destroyed by sugared sodas and a failure to brush and floss
dragging themselves through the medical complex at dawn looking for a fix
thinning-hair old hipsters burning for relief from aching jaws at the healing hands of dedicated professionals among their shining instruments
dedicated professionals who did not drop out of the University of Arkansas and never saw Mohammedan angels among the rooftops
Rod McKuen Visits the Dentist
I am like a molar; I have chewed alone
Gnawed a hundred hamburgers
Never found a bone
Still and all I’m toothy
Reason is you see
Once in a while along the way
Dentists have been good to me.
Mhall46184@aol.com
Macbeth, Doctor Zhivago, Captain Call, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Allen Ginsberg, and Rod McKuen Visit the Dentist but Have to Wait for Beowulf's Root Canal
In gratitude for all the wonderful dentists, hygienists, and
technicians who keep us chewing!
Macbeth Visits the Dentist
Is this a drill which I see before me
The whirring drill outstretched to my teeth
O happiest gas! Come let me clutch thee!
Before my body I throw my dental shield
Dr. Zhivago Visits the Dentist
Poor dental hygiene is for crowds of mediocrities
Only individuals seek dentistry
And they shun those who tolerate bad teeth
How many things in the world deserve our loyalty?
A dentist whose papers are in order
Captain Call Visits the Dentist
Call saw that the dentist was looking at him
The nitrous oxide drained out of him
Leaving him feeling tired
“I hate a bad tooth. I won’t tolerate it.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko Visits the Dentist
For a tooth to come out
Some of the pain must be devoted to Stalin
Soviet dentistry demanded happy endings
I knew I could floss and brush better than Mayakovsky
Bella’s teeth were second only to those of Akhmatova
Only I could make Babi Yar all about me and my teeth
When I saw a dentist in Zima Junction
I saw the truth of the Revolution in her little mirror
Allen Ginsberg Visits the Dentist
I saw the best teeth of my generation destroyed by sugared sodas and a failure to brush and floss
dragging themselves through the medical complex at dawn looking for a fix
thinning-hair old hipsters burning for relief from aching jaws at the healing hands of dedicated professionals among their shining instruments
dedicated professionals who did not drop out of the University of Arkansas and never saw Mohammedan angels among the rooftops
Rod McKuen Visits the Dentist
I am like a molar; I have chewed alone
Gnawed a hundred hamburgers
Never found a bone
Still and all I’m toothy
Reason is you see
Once in a while along the way
Dentists have been good to me.
Dentistry and literature!
Lawrence Hall
Dec 2017
Upon Re-Reading Doctor Zhivago
for two friends
Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.
A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.
Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.
For generations the seasons in darkness slept,
Since neither love nor life were free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world sighs
The old world sighed in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascended, pushed the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.
And now golden sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.
The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring fragments of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.
For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over her wide lands high church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s eternal now.
for two friends
Love lost along abandoned railway lines,
Grave-cold, grave-still, grave-dark beneath dead snow,
A thousand miles of ashes, corpses, ghosts -
Sacrarium of a martyred civilization.
A silent wolf pads west across the ice,
The rotting remnant of a young man’s arm,
Slung casually between its pale pink jaws -
A cufflink clings to a bit of ragged cloth.
Above the wolf, the ice, the arm, the link
A dead star hangs, dead in a moonless sky,
It gives no light, there is no life; a mist
Arises from the clotted, haunted earth.
For generations the seasons in darkness slept,
Since neither love nor life were free to sing
The eternal hymns of long-forbidden spring -
And yet beneath the lies the old world sighs
The old world sighed in sudden ecstasy
A whispered resurrection of the truth
As tender stems ascended, pushed the stones
Aside, away into irrelevance.
And now golden sunflowers laugh with the sun
Like merry young lads in their happy youth
Coaxing an ox-team into the fields,
Showing off their muscles to merry young girls.
The men of steel are only stains of rust,
Discoloring fragments of broken drains,
As useless as the rotted bits of brass
Turned up sometimes by Uncle Sasha’s plow.
For this is Holy Russia, eternally young;
Over her wide lands high church domes bless the sky,
While Ruslan and Ludmilla bless the earth
With the songs of lovers in God’s eternal now.
The 1965 film version of DOCTOR ZHIVAGO is a great film, and the more recent mini-series is good, but these well-intentioned endeavours are but shadows of the book.
See:
Wk kortas
Pennsylvania
W.k. kortas lives and works by the maxim "Mediocre means better than some." The first collection of his poetry, titled The Romeo Letters and Other Poems, is available at Createspace.com and at Amazon.com.
Wk kortas 1h
The De-Commissioned Zhivago
It has been stamped with dispassionate blue ink,
Signifying its future lack of suitability to sit on the shelves,
Having been elbowed aside by this and that year’s thing
(And the book had not been checked out since the mid-seventies,
Perhaps some young man all but short-circuited
By the prospect of a bathing Julie Christie,
Or some female counterpart shedding bell-bottomed tears
Over doomed love, which, in her cosmology,
All such things were fated to be)
Placed in some temporary cardboard casket
Which once held bananas or copier paper or ancient time cards,
Sitting cheek to elbow with cookbooks, breathless biorhythm tomes,
Buffeted about forces unseen and beyond its control
As it faces the uncertain and uneasy prospect of possible reclamation.
This piece was inspired by, and can be read as a companion piece to, Lawrence Hall's "On an Inscription from Katya to Gary in a Pushkin Anthology Found in a Used Book Sale". Obviously, the good Lawrence is to be held blameless in any of the shortcomings of this effort.
#istrelnikovedthisoneupprettybadly
See:
Wk kortas
Pennsylvania
W.k. kortas lives and works by the maxim "Mediocre means better than some." The first collection of his poetry, titled The Romeo Letters and Other Poems, is available at Createspace.com and at Amazon.com.
Wk kortas 1h
The De-Commissioned Zhivago
It has been stamped with dispassionate blue ink,
Signifying its future lack of suitability to sit on the shelves,
Having been elbowed aside by this and that year’s thing
(And the book had not been checked out since the mid-seventies,
Perhaps some young man all but short-circuited
By the prospect of a bathing Julie Christie,
Or some female counterpart shedding bell-bottomed tears
Over doomed love, which, in her cosmology,
All such things were fated to be)
Placed in some temporary cardboard casket
Which once held bananas or copier paper or ancient time cards,
Sitting cheek to elbow with cookbooks, breathless biorhythm tomes,
Buffeted about forces unseen and beyond its control
As it faces the uncertain and uneasy prospect of possible reclamation.
This piece was inspired by, and can be read as a companion piece to, Lawrence Hall's "On an Inscription from Katya to Gary in a Pushkin Anthology Found in a Used Book Sale". Obviously, the good Lawrence is to be held blameless in any of the shortcomings of this effort.
#istrelnikovedthisoneupprettybadly