Thursday, July 11, 2024

How is Your Adventure So Far? - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

How is Your Adventure So Far?

 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

 

-Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

 

Even if you are looking up at an I.V. drip

Instead of green leaves and a summer sky

Your adventure is not nearly at an end

Not even in this life – and the next life, wow!

 

Your childhood joys have never slipped away

That cheesy 45 rpm that graced your first dance

Has not come to the end of its groovy grooves

You’ve still got the happiness, the moves

 

Your first job, boot camp, university

Riding a big red bus ‘round Piccadilly Circus

Drinking from your canteen on a mountain top

Your first kiss, that evening in Rome – there’s more to come!

 

Your first car is still parked in the driveway

Waiting to take you where you always meant to go

Sunday, July 7, 2024

A Hurricane: Outer Bands and Inner Thoughts - haiku

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Hurricane: Outer Bands and Inner Thoughts

 

Sun gives way to clouds

Stillness to winds, birds circle

Searching for meaning

Reading the Magna Carta Will Make Us Smarter - doggerel for Supreme Court Justices

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Reading the Magna Carta Will Make Us Smarter

 

(And it bans fish weirs in the Thames)

 

The Kings have been subject to the law since 1215

But are American presidents? That remains to be seen

 

In Defense of King George | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)

 

The President Can Now Assassinate You, Officially | The Nation

A Sunday Morning Church Message: "Some Folks Need Killing"

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

A Sunday Morning Church Message: “Some Folks Need Killing”

 

“…disciple-makers through the power of Jesus Christ!”

 

-Lake Church

 

A lieutenant-governor strutting and yelling in church

Demanded the deaths of “some folks” unspecified

The faithful of Lake Church heard out his deadly cause

And then obediently applauded him -

 

The man who might someday order their executions

 

 

NC Lt. Gov. Robinson defends ‘folks need killing’ comments (msn.com)

 

Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson at NC church meeting: “Some folks need killing” (yahoo.com)

 

HOME | Lake Church NC

Hurricane Track Attack Forth and Back - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Hurricane Track Attack Forth and Back

 

Spaghetti models are not really spaghetti

But only colored lines across electric maps

Squiggling in iridescence around the Gulf

Slithering atop the waves, then to your house

 

The weather reporters’ cliches fall from the skies

As microbursts of bottled-water-babbles

Canned goods and fresh radio batteries

Tune to this station as your roof blows away

 

Spaghetti models are not really spaghetti

But watch the news in the street – he’s getting all wet-ty!

Yes, We Are a Republic, Much Like Haiti - poem

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Yes, We Are a Republic – Much Like Haiti

 

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

 

-Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

In America every night is Kristalnacht

Everyone seems to hate everyone else

Gunfights in our parks, mass murders everywhere

Communist-made fireworks celebrate freedom

 

From state to state a reichskirche is on the march

Employment is down, prices are up

Vultures circle our dying President

Some in Congress promote raw genocide

 

The Supreme Court authorizes presidential crimes -

As St. Thomas More said to Lord Norfolk:

“I show you the times”

It Wasn't the Fourth of July - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

It Wasn’t the Fourth of July

 

     That we may wander o’er this bloody field

     To book our dead, and then to bury them

 

-Henry V IV.vii.75-76

 

It wasn’t the fourth of July, but it was about then

Near the Cambodian border, on the Vam Co Tay

Searching for two American airman whose machine had gone down

Down, down into the steaming green Vam Co Tay

 

Bloated and floating, quite still when we saw them

The sloshy prop wash bumped them about a bit

Empty eye sockets, mouths open in silent screams

We poncho-linered their bodies aboard the boat

 

Cigarettes of despair against the stench and rot

This was not what we sang about in school

Children Die; The Authorities Babble - takeaway from a press conference of 5 July 2025

  Lawrence Hall Mhall46184@aol.com Dispatches for the Colonial Office   Children Die; The Authorities Babble   The governor’s Pr...