Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Front Toward Enemy
If
In what we may laughingly call real life
You can read those three words
You’re in the wrong place
‘Bye-‘bye
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
Front Toward Enemy - very short free-verse poem
The Cold Has Gotten Old - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
The Cold Has
Gotten Old
For many years
I was a self-appointed inspector of snow-storms...
-Thoreau, Walden
The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees
And little lights in all their vestmental tints
No longer counterpoint the dark northern breeze
No visions of spring, no dreamings, no hints
The happy lawns of summer are mud and frost
The path to the cowshed is a rattle of sleet
The trail to the fishing hole was yesterday lost
And our boots are too thin for our freezing feet
But after our chores boiling hot coffee, please -
The cold has gotten old without Christmas trees!
Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Nothing You Write is Confidential - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Your Poem’s
Background Check
And
above all, who is in power in that part of the country,
or,
rather, who will be by the time we get there?
-Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
We don’t suffer a Soviet Writers’ Union
Except that we do – and what are you up to?
Have you written an ordinary adjective
That will be forbidden in a future place?
You sound
suspiciously colonialist
Last year DEI was mandatory
This year it will be a forbidden scheme
What guidelines for little magazines
Will be cleansed in the New Order to come?
Harriet
Monroe is a non-person now
Who will be in charge of your poetry and your life
Whenever you don’t get to wherever it was
that you were going?
Monday, January 13, 2025
Your Changes Have Been Saved - poem
The transfer has botched the formatting. Please accept as is.
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Your Changes Have
Been Saved
Noticed the passive voice the passive voice is to be noticed
You did not make changes changes
were not made by you
but
changes were made
You did not save changes changes
were not saved by you
but
changes were saved
If you were relevant you might have been consulted
Imagine There's No "Imagine" - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Imagine There’s No “Imagine”
“Christendom has had a series of revolutions, and in each one of them Christianity has died. Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a God who knew the way out of the grave.”
-G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
Imagine a world without anthems that whine
It’s difficult if we try; the ‘seventies cry
Rockabilly tunes in the communion line
And fling fluorescents from a dropped-ceiling sky
The ‘seventies tell the Bible what to say
And dangling speakers program us with a primitive beat
Manifestos proclaim the ideology of the day
The Gospel is reduced to an electronic tweet
But, peace!
The tie-dyed ‘seventies still croak and wail
But it is the Eternal that will prevail
Stand-to for Night Patrol - short poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Stand-To for Night
Patrol
The
Americans were said to believe that the Communists are on the defensive…
-New
York Times, 11 January 1970
I keep seeing a boat’s black silhouette
Upon the red water, against the red sky
And the black-death tree-line along the shore
A dark, decaying scene, and I don’t know why
There is More Than One Book - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
There is More Than One Book
A civilization writes and reads its books
As poetry, pictures, prose, and glorious song
Of war and work and love and peaceful fields
Scholarship and courage and a people’s arts
But when unhappy men with an unhappy god
Maintain that their one book is all we’ll need
In submission to build an empire of death
The threat is clear: their god doesn’t want us
Reading and writing are civilization
From the very beginning of Creation
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)