The Gates of Kiev are Smoke-Poisoned Skies - poem

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Gates of Kiev are Smoke-Poisoned Skies

 

The Gates of Kiev are now only the skies

Drone-battered-bombed by the Siloviki

Against the peace of churches and sunflower fields

Workers and scholars and pastoral scenes

 

The Gates of Kiev once opened to all the world

Musicians, artists, builders, priests, and poets

Departed as missionaries to every land

Civilization from the Kievan Rus’

 

But now

 

The Gates of Kiev are smoke-poisoned skies

Through which foul Satan falls upon Slavic lands

Poet, Just Look at You - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Poet, Just Look at You

 

Just look at you, wrestling with your ideas

Perceiving beauty among the burning ruins

Gently shaping the sorrows of the day

Into comfort

 

Just look at you, wrestling with your words

Heart and mind in position of function

Boldly shaping the confusions of the day

Into meaning

 

Just look at you, putting your readers first –

You are good

Who Shares Your Desk? - poem

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Who Shares Your Desk?

 

Hundreds of friends share my desk with me

Leaving coffee and wine and tobacco stains

All over the place, their thoughts cluttering my mind

Dreams and possibilities for my heart

 

Yevtushenko and his Silver Age poets

More Russian poets

Shakespeare in a worn college omnibus

Larry McMurtry

          (One must understood that in Texas Lonesome Dove is a holy text)

The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse

The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse

The Oxford Book of Christian Verse

The Oxford Book of Seventeenth Century Verse

Leonard Cohen and his famous blue raincoat

Cavafy at an oblique angle to the universe

Wordsworth and Dorothy out for a walk

Plath

Keats

Sondheim

Montale

Hopkins

The Oxford Book of English Verse, the 1939 Q Edition

          (Not that Q!)

The Oxford Book of English Verse, the 1999 Ricks Edition

Pasternak

Lewis

Frankl

The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse

Kafka

Herrick

Milosz

Virgil

Tennyson

Wavell and his manly flowers

Claude McKay

300 Tang poets (they do seem to drink a lot)

Mary Oliver and all her doggies

 

So there they are, in untidy rows and piles

          (The Tang poets simply will not behave)

They are patient with my slovenliness

Pens, screwdrivers, a Rosary, two light bulbs

          (I don’t know why)

A thermometer from my grandparents’ house

 

A 1962 Missale Romano and a toy fire truck

An Orthodox ikon from Tod of happy memory

A Tupperware coffee cup they don’t make anymore

Spare spectacles for seeing what comes next

 

Hundred of friends who ask the best of me

And who don’t mind my rows and piles of words

They talk to me, and I ask their advice

I pray that I am not a disappointment to them

 

Or to you

For Remembrance Day / Veterans' Day: An Old G.I. Belt Buckle - poem

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

An Old G.I. Belt Buckle

 

 

For Storekeeper Third Class Thomas of Knoxville, Tennessee

 

“What he believed, he did.”

 

-Laurence Binyon

 

“In Memory of George Calderon”

 

 

An old belt buckle in the back of a shelf

Greening brass on a belt now much too short

Maybe the same one I wore on the Vam Co Tay

Scattered thoughts shift to Thomas; I don’t know why

 

A good man with a clipboard and a fifty-cal

Sitting on the edge of a bunk feeding a child

Spooning c-rats and making the kid laugh

“One for meeee…and one for youuuu!”

 

I wonder whatever happened to good ‘ol Thomas

I wonder whatever happened to the child

 

I wonder whatever happened to all of us

Atheist Chaplains Forging Mixed Metaphors - poem (of a sort)

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Atheist Chaplains Forging Mixed Metaphors

 

“Atheist chaplains are forging a new path in a changing world”

 

-CNN 7 November 2024

 

One seldom thinks of chaplains at a forge

Work-weary, work-stained from hours of smoke and sweat

With mighty hammer strokes bending hot iron

To the will of the artisan in useful things

 

Some writers forge nothing but metaphors tired

From overuse, and mixed as verbal soup

In music, art, literature, and life paths can be

 

Cleared

Paved

Traveled

Surveyed

explored

Followed

Noted

Marked

Mapped

Found

 

But it is not in the nature of paths to be forged

 

Atheist chaplains and metaphor soup

Are nothing more than an ouroborosian loop

 

(Look upon this fresh metaphor and neologism

And despair)

Vice-President Kamala Harris’ Speech of Gratitude and Farewell to Her Faithful Followers in the Early Hours of 6 November 2024

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Vice-President Kamala Harris’ Speech of Gratitude and Farewell to Her Faithful Followers in the Early Hours of 6 November 2024

Election Night 2024: Dry Bones - poem

  

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Election Night 2024: Dry Bones

 

 

“All we are, basically, are monkeys with car keys”

 

-Grandma Woody in Northern Exposure, “Animals R Us,” 1991

 

 

An early dusk falls under clouds from the Gulf

Yellow houselights wink on as daylight winks off

Supper in greasy bags from fast-fooderies

That everyone argues they can’t afford

 

Then like the lozenge in A Space Odyssey

A screen appears and dominates all

And family groupings center themselves around it

In excited cavortings before the images

 

Of brightly-colored cultic election scores

As fists swinging dry bones crush enemy skulls