Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Third Sunday in
Extraordinary Time
Dear friends in Christ,
The divine liturgy will be delayed for a few minutes
While the new regime checks everyone’s papers
Saturday, January 25, 2025
Third Sunday in Extraordinary Time - very short poem
Monday, January 20, 2025
Tiny Artists of the Night - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Tiny Artists of the Night
Snowflakes by flashlight in the deepening dark
I left them to their night of proper tasks
They beamed down to the earth all over the park
And for the cold grey dawn they’ve made great masks
Plateaus of iridescent white to layer the lawn
Transcendent beauty in a transient medium
Still falling against the feeble all-day dawn
Little artists who form great truths from tedium
And then mysteriously they fly away
To shape the existentials some other day
The Dignity of the Office - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
The Dignity of the
Office
Whatever the incoming president fancies
(One hopes to speak without fear of libel)
Ageing (entertainers) in chancy pantsies
And will he take his oaf on a Village People Bible?
20 January 2025
Sunday, January 19, 2025
The White House Inaugural Banquet and the Idle Dishwashing Machine - doggerel
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
The White House Inaugural Banquet
and the Idle Dishwashing Machine
Henry II: Fork?
Becket: It's for pronging meat and carrying it to the mouth. It saves you dirtying your fingers.
Henry II: But then you dirty the fork.
Becket: Yes, but it's washable.
Henry II: So are your fingers. I don't see the point.
-Becket (1964)
The White House dishwashing machine is idle, kids
Our leaders grub with fingers for their food
Cardboarded burgers as greasy pyramids
On mahogany Queen Anne tables strewed
The sycophants kiss their effendi’s (ring)
And fall to feeding at his soigne trough
No waiters are needed to pour and pass
The diners chortle and chew and choke and cough
The White House dishwashing machine is idle, guys
(Dessert is Velveeta oozing over French fries)
Comment is Freed
From:samf@substack.com
To:mhall46184@aol.com
Saturday, January 18, 2025
The Holy Bible as a Base for a Potted Plant - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
The Holy Bible as
a Base for a Potted Plant
On a little shelf in our local pharmacy
A somewhat tattered Bible has reposed for years
And on that Bible is positioned a potted plant
And above them on the wall a cowboy cartoon
The iconography is elusive to me
One seeks for meaning in an assemblage:
So why this thing in this place at this time?
Existentially speaking (as we said in the ‘60s)
Why?
A curious piece of iconography
On a little shelf in our local pharmacy
Dag Hammarskjold Negotiates with Himself and with God - poem
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Dag Hammarskjold Negotiates with Himself and with God
Cf. Auden’s introduction to Vagmarken
We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny
but what we put into it is ours.
Vagmarken (Markings), p. 55 in the 1965 Knopf edition
When you were a little child
If you attend a school named for Dag Hammarskjold
How long did it take you to learn to spell his name?
And you are now an adult
And blessed with Hammarskjold’s Vagmarken
How long did it take you to joy in his transcendent good?
Thursday, January 16, 2025
Binding Each Word with a Prayer
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches
for the Colonial Office
Binding Each Word
with an Incantation, a Charm, a Spell
You. Not a generalized out-there “you” but – YOU
Gentle Writer
A mysterious thought is dream’ed unto you
Or a conclusion sails from your observant mind
You take a pen of goose-quill carefully carved
You dip it into a horn or pottle of ink
Not a metaphorical inkhorn of floridity
But the horn of a beast, hollowed out
Stoppered with a fitted wooden plug
And charged with ink of a curious blue
Of minerals or dyes or the juice of berries boiled
And worked with pagan spells or Christian prayers
You take an expensive page of animal-skin
Worked out with scrapings and scrubbings and acids
Or perhaps imported sheets of Egyptian papyrus
(Against which some of the younger brethren sneer)
Remember the annual budget! Be careful, now!
Paper doesn’t grow on trees, you know!
(Well, you could argue about the papyrus)
You set the light just right, the sun or a lamp
The Altar is where candles glow in honor of Our Lord
(And then there’s the budget; candles are expensive)
So you must work with the sun or a tallow lamp
At a writing slope angled as the amarius says
You think a thought
You lift your pen
With a prayer upon it
You guide it down
You write a word
A word
Each word is magic
What did you write?
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