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

                                                 About Your Poem

If you HP a poem, and only one or two read it
And no one ticks a box or writes a response
Then have you worked a positive good into the world?
Oh, yes!

For you have written a verse upon a page
Upon a leaf that sails upon the air
Upon wild solar winds and to the stars
To where

A Voice reads it as a love letter to all
Who are so very blessed in knowing you

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

                                              $50,000 Signing Bonus


                                                         …even-handed justice
        Commends th’ingredients of our poisoned chalice
        To our own lips.

                                            -Macbeth I.vii.4-6


A temptation, a poisoned chalice
Thirty pieces of silver for your soul
A mess of pottage flavoured with malice
                    If you just
Drink with Macbeth and Judas from one bowl

A uniform, money, swagger, and power
You can be Unferth, that miles gloriosus
The waffle house Waffen of the hour
                    If you just
Accept that yours is a poor prognosis

For selling your poor and tattered soul to I.C.E.
You will pay at some future Nuremberg trial                                                  
                                                  a fearful price

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

                        “Kind Hearts are More Than Coronets”

                         Tennyson – “Lady Clare Vere de Vere”

But coronets will get you set
In better seats at Goodwood, you bet

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

                         She Thinks My Tractor’s Schleppy

Anyone who can hear “She thinks my tractor’s ****”
With a teary eye of sentimentality
For a lost golden age of rural life

Da*ned sure never worked on a farm



Cf. Kenny Chesney, “She Thinks My Tractor's ****,” lyrics by Jim Collins and Paul Overstreet.

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

                                    Long Have I Loved

Long have I loved my mistress Lady Poetry
Embraced her rhythms and her subtle words
In dreams, in fields blood-sodden, in lonely rooms
And among the golden glory of autumn days

But then one day, as in a Palantir
Elvish songs floated among the stars
For she who had lived in me as whisperings  
Spoke clearly to my somewhat weary heart

I always knew that her promises are true -
Only late did I learn that her name is You

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

                             Forgive Me for not Writing Yesterday

I was reclined before a bin of farriers’ tools
Ironmongery smithied in shining steel
In a room shaded institutional green
Fluorescent lights, only one door

Gadgets clipped to me, needles poked into me
Surely soon would sound the voice of Number Two:
“Information. We want information.”
Thinking of pain, then poetry, then you

But having a dying tooth extracted
Does not lend itself to metre or rhyme!





(Lines 6-7 allude to Patrick McGoohan’s brilliant series, The Prisoner)

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

                                        Dawn Across the Planet

Soon you will be awake for breakfast and tea
A good cup of tea for beginning the day
As the waning Harvest Moon sails west
And you and the sun rise happily in the east