Scenes from a Funeral Home Calendar Featuring a Decidedly English Jesus - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Scenes from a Funeral Home Calendar Featuring a Decidedly English Jesus

 

 

“It’s pretty, but is it Art?”

 

-the Devil in Kipling’s “The Conundrum of the Workshops”

 

 

Jesus and his followers appear to be on sabbatical from Oxford

Strolling along in a peaceful English world

Among perfect climax-forest English oaks

Under a dreamy English summer sky

 

Young Mary plays with placid English lambs

In an English meadow all flowered and green

Anna and Simeon prophesy in an English temple

The Centurion is as English as a Grenadier Guard                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

For a child (me) who grew up on a farm in poverty

Realism in pastoral art just won’t do, you see!

 

(And, really, we can’t have young Jesus

Skipping among sheep droppings, now can we?)

Resolution for a New Year – or for a New Life: poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Resolution for a New Year – or for a New Life

 

Perhaps dear old Puddleglum, who burnt his feet

When stamping out the fires of wickedness

Made a fine new year’s resolution with

“I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can.”

A Little New Year's Magic - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

A Little New Year’s Magic for You

 

A far frosty field

Full fit for a fairies’ dance

‘Neath the New Year’s moon

Cuddled up with Cold Medicine and a Warm Dachshund - poem

 

Lawrence Hall & Nyquil ™

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Cuddled up with Cold Medicine and a Warm Dachshund

 

A January lawn is a desert of desiccated leaves

Winter winds driving them as desolate dunes

Shoaling against the oaks who gave them life

Then in the autumn watched them fall to their deaths

 

Croakery crows almost seem to splash among them

Searching out seeds and corn and kitchen scraps

In beak to nose confrontations with squirrels

Darwinians struggling upon the sleeping earth

 

A January lawn is a desert of desiccated leaves

As winter winds batter my window eaves

 

Addendum:

 

(Each line is framed with a cough or a sneeze

And fever one minute followed by a freeze

And a wheeze!)

Meditation upon a Starlit Northern Sea - poem

 

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Meditation upon a Starlit Northern Sea

 

The sea is black, the sky is midnight blue

The crowning moon and her cold, pendant stars

Call color to fall upon the shoreline sand and snow

And too upon a silent Dreamer who stands

 

A silent Dreamer privileged to view this scene

Who stands upon this mysterious Arctic shore

To place for us our hopes beneath the stars

And yield them to the mysteries of the night

 

The sea is black, the sky is midnight blue

And the silent Dreamer is who else but…?

If This Were Your Real Life Your Would Have Been Given Better Instructions - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

If This Were Your Real Life 

You Would Have Been Given Better Instructions

 

 

This is only a test -

if this were your real life you would have been given better instructions

 

-seen on a bumper sticker

 

 

I took my cough to a plastic plaque

My wheezing and sneezing and headache too

My unaccountably rigidy back

And sputum that reeked like a witches’ brew

 

I waved the little cotton probe all through

My nostrils where the wicked virus lurked

And then I thoughtfully dropped five drops unto

A window in the plaque, and, lo! It worked!

 

I don’t have the covid and I don’t have the ‘flu

So why do I feel so blown-out blue!

(N.B. I take my medical advice from my brilliant nurse practitioner, not from the InterGossip nor from Robert Kennedy.)

Not Herod's Household Calvary This Time - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Not Herod’s Household Cavalry This time

 

 

The Holy Innocents

 

 

Not Herod’s household cavalry this time

His personal SS with their spears and swords

From screaming children ripping their sacred lives

And flinging the tiny fragments into the dust

 

Now Herod sends his tailored representatives

With silky-soft, serpentine promises

Would you like a dress as nice as this?

For only an hour or two of easy work

 

Softly now

 

Don’t worry; your parents will never know -

Because they will never choose to know