Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
“Is Life an Open Road or a Blind Alley?”
-de Chardin, Pensee 33
You can tell it’s an open road because
Someone has crow-barred the rusty lock and chain
You can tell it’s a blind alley because
Of your dark glasses and your tapped-out white cane
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
If We
are a School of Poetry, Then When is Recess?
…what we mean to establish is a school for the Lord’s
service
-St. Benedict’s prologue to his Rule
1997 English edition, Ampleforth Abbey
When a poet consecrates a poem
(Which is in the nature of what
poets do)
And a soul-friend breathes beauty
into it
Then they have formed a school of
poetry
Which is not a school for the
Lord’s service
Except that it is – all this
shifting of words
From chaos into meaning and
purpose and love
Is a school of life, only without
the home-room pledge
(or morning Mass or a chemistry
lab)
We write in procession through
cloisters of hope
To elevate each other as
presentations of truth
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
Envision a World Without Mission Statements
Your Thinking has Been Edited for Time and Format
Let us propose a series of abatements -
Deliver us, O Lord, from mission statements
Lawrence
Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
How Big is Our Universe?
Time goes by – or do
we?
- The Once and
Future King / Camelot
How big is our universe? How deep? How far?
In youth we learn of planets, orbits, and stars
Of the infinite Great Dance of the Spheres
And God, before forever, Who created all
But meditate upon this pilgrimage -
Will we shrink it into a transient Now
Which with death and dust and ruin and rot
Seems to go away even before the next hour?
Let us stand on this cusp of Creation
And together we will consider the Beyond
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
Basho’s Frog for Our Time
An old roadside ditch
A frog leaps into the lane
‘Neath Subaru tires
I suppose I had better apologize to Basho, his frog, the Japanese people, Subaru, the pretty little tree frog glaring at me through my bedroom window, and all lovers of Haiku!
Later: a dear friend reminds me that I have touched on this topic before:
Flat Frog Floogie
The silent carport
A frog croaks under a tire
Then silence resumes
Pinched from Basho’s famous pond poem
Music: “Flat Foot Floogie,” 1938
Lawrence
Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's
Journal of Life, Literature and Love
A Memorandum of Understanding
And a Contemplation
of the FIFA Peace Prize
The tiny hands of schoolchildren on fire
The tiny hands of schoolchildren sobbing for life
The old men on both sides claiming victory
Over
The ashes of schoolchildren at Shajareh Tayyebeh
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
The Great Riding Lawnmower Chase
A Song of My People
In the dust beside the highway
Wide ol’ Texas four-lane highway
Ran a fat man in his anger
In his white shorts, in his anger
To another man just like him
Mower-mounted on a lawn
On a John Deere painted green
But this was not a peaceful scene
Like angry Pillsbury Doughboys
Or like dropouts from a Sumo school
They grappled in the roadside dust
In fleshy fury (not in lust)
The mower-man finally thought it best
To steer his steed into the west
Across the highway, a running fight
Dodging traffic in the morning light
The foot-man circled, the mower-man turned
The shrieking brakes of a big truck burned
Combat resumed in the turning lane
Beeps and honks again and again
I never saw the end of this chase
Who won the day, who won the race
Of if by the beginning of the next day’s dawn
Someone had finished mowing that lawn
In this I played with the Longfellow / Hiawatha meter, which is far more appropriate for serious long poetry, not a short frivolity. Longfellow sent me a note from the beyond advising me not to do this again.
