Saturday, August 9, 2025

Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening - shallow rhyming doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening

 

From an idea by a friend in Thailand

 

Whose Deconstructionist Narrative this is I think I know

Their (because we mustn’t say “her” or “his”)

New Criticism is on their podcast, though

They will not see me applying Phenomenology here

To help fill up their woods with Neo-Post-Colonialist blow

 

My little solar car must think it other-gendered

To pause while I Conceptualize without a Starbuck’s near

Between Foucault and Derrida here

Next to the Sapir-Whorf Theory, and without a beer

 

They give their location transponder a Derrida shake

To demand a formal apology for this cultural mistake

The only other sound’s the Existential creep

Of Masonic Catholic Nazi Zionism on the take

 

Judgmental stereotypes are flying, shallow and cheap

But I have an Inner Reality to keep

And an Intertextual Analysis of Post-Structuralism to steep

And an Aesthetic Objectification of Dialectics to steep

Friday, August 8, 2025

As You Sometimes Remind Me - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

As You Sometimes Remind Me…

 

 

One day I'll suddenly recall:
The sun exists!

 

-Pasternak, “About These Poems”1

 

 

When the world focuses on a sheet of paper

In a little room where hopes have come to die

The pen can’t write out a prescription for life

Or limn the remedies for a fallen world

 

We begin our days as did Pasternak

A cup of tea against the fear, the fear

Unsure of the conflicting daily edicts

The babblings about ballrooms, tariffs, and arrests

 

Pasternak opened a window to light and fair

 

And to the children playing in the snow he cried,

“My dears, what century is it outside?”

 

 

1Translations vary

Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening - shallow rhyming doggerel

  Lawrence Hall Mhall46184@aol.com Dispatches for the Colonial Office   Stopping by Literary Interpretations on a Snowy Evening   ...