Our Little Universities - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Our Little Universities

 

From an idea by Nivek

 

Many books are little universities

Complete with faculties and study halls

Grassy lawns on which to argue ideas

Syllabi written from your heart and mind

 

Laboratories of the mind for distilling wisdom

A concert hall of happy voices in song

“Pomes All Sizes” spoken from the heart

And maybe a Rain Tree on your walk to class

 

The Brothers Karamazov as a prayer book

300 Tang Poems with the wisdom of China

The Oxford Book of English Verse, edited by Q

          (Not THAT Q!)

Doctor Zhivago in squabbling translations

 

And some have spoken most eloquently

for Goodnight Moon

And now what university of yours helps sing

the world in tune?

Let’s All Meet in Cicely - sonnet

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Let’s All Meet in Cicely

 

 

From an idea flown all the way from Thailand

 

 

Let’s all meet in Cicely before the snow

You can find me sitting outside The Brick

At peace as the gentle autumn breezes blow

Having put aside my hiking stick

 

Fleischmann joins us on that old wooden bench

Chris-in-the-Morning stops by for a beer

Hollings gives Shelly a husbandly pinch

She takes his broom and with it smacks his rear

 

Maurice and Maggie, Ruth-Anne, Marilyn, and Ed

Drop in with stories of love and life and history

And news brought in by plane and road and sled

To this Brigadoon of happy mystery

 

Let’s all meet in Cicely before the snow

And share in its peace before we go

Never Begin a Poem with “I” - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Never Begin a Poem with “I”

 

I suppose I have been commanded to write

These fragile words in attempted iambs

Which few will ever read or ever want to read

But then – you are reading them

                                                          Thank you

You’ve Read Your Last Free Article - not exactly a poem

 Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

You’ve Read Your Last Free Article

 

Yes, I have.

 

(Click. Delete.)

Leave It To Beaver - The Shakespearean I.C.E. Episode - pastiche and doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Leave it to Beaver – The Shakespearean I.C.E. Episode

 

Dramatis Personae:

 

Ward, a husband and father

 

Wally, Ward’s teenaged son

 

June, Ward’s wife, accomplishing hussefery in a dress and pearls

 

Beaver, Ward and June’s younger son

 

 

Ward:

 

Wally, I knowest thou hath merry plans for the morrow

But I must tell thee, to thy woe and sorrow

That thou’rt to stay home, and mow the lawn

 

Wally:

 

Oh, golly, gee, seest thou my face turn wan?

Beloved father, I cannot with thy orders comport

For I cannot find my comradely passport

Nor, in addition to that paperwork dearth,

Yea, verily, my certificate of birth!

Without which workers are subject to arrest

By I.C.E., as the news and warnings attest

 

June:

 

‘Tis true – I.C.E. feareth every gangbanger and yob

But they will imprison some kid at his job

And Superman might get thee; I.C.E. hired him today

That is his new truth, justice, and th’American way

 

Beaver:

 

Gee, Wally, if thou’rt carried to Alcatraz

Can I have thy room?

 

Voice Off:                  

                                                      We needeth no stinkin’ warrants!

 

Exeunt omnes, pursued by Dogberries with guns

Disturbances in Church - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Disturbances in Church

 

The more I am disturbed by liturgical novelties

The less I am disturbed by God

 

The less I am disturbed by liturgical novelties

The more I am disturbed by God

 

All of which is logical, not odd

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