Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Some Clinical Notes on Anaesthesia and, Like, StuffZZZZ

A chair in the waiting room

A chair in a consulting room

A chair in a room where they rearrange your body parts

A blood pressure cuff that chuffs and puffs every few minutes

(And can you say, “sphygmomanometer?”)

(I thought not)

Clamps on your wrists

(Is the prisoner ready, chaplain?)

Steel trays of shiny steel things for cutting and drilling and clamping

A quest for veins. Not that vein. No, this vein. No, where’d it go…

Ouch

Let there be blood

Are you comfortable?

You’re going to start feeling sleepy

Grey floating boxes and conversations among them as they move about in an unreality which for the non-time-being are the / a reality and they’re nice enough little boxes but why are they grey and there is no fear and there is no pain but there is no control only grey floating boxes speaking to each other

Another chair in another room – how…?

And those are your post-procedure instructions…are you ready to go…?

I want a cup of coffee

Nothing hot until tomorrow

Sunday, February 1, 2026

The University of Granddaddy - poem

Lawrence Hall

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

The University of Granddaddy

Class meets on the wooden steps of the old back porch

Syllabus:

Talking. Listening. Whittling on a length of cedar

Please bring: a Schrade-Walden Old Timer pocketknife

Pale Shadows and seasons - poem

Lawrence Hall

A re-write and re-post of an older poem:

Pale Shadows and Seasons

Pale shadows and seasons and leaves drift by

The slanting sun of February falls

With merciless mortality upon

Our weak attempts to prepare for spring

The leaves we mulch today mulch us tomorrow

The roses we prune in anticipation of June

Await the night when we are pruned for them

While the wolf pack keens beneath the ancient moon

No, It Wasn't the Medications - poem

Lawrence Hall

mhall46184@aol.com

No, It Wasn't the Medications

Last night my friend and mentor was dreamed to me

He was himself again, and so was I

Among Spenserian fields and forests and friends

In a summer world all warm and green

In a time of waiting rooms and surgeries

Slow days of headaches and painful awkwardness

Appointments, lab reports, diagnoses

He came as a comfort, a vision of what will be

We did meet again, and we did smile

And so, just so, we all will meet again

Saturday, January 31, 2026

Maybe Winter is Tired - poem

Lawrence Hall

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Maybe Winter is Tired

And taking a break for a few sunny days

Icicles have dripped and dropped away to earth

Merry breezes breathe away dawn’s drifting haze

A warm front soon after the new year’s birth

But even now the north drops down in greys

The shifting wind blows dark, decaying leaves

Away to prep for tomorrow’s icy glaze

As the wilding weather bobs and weaves

The paling sun drops coldly in the west -

False spring in its own turn now takes a rest

This is the Church House, This is the Steeple - poem

Lawrence Hall

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love