Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love
Crawfish are not in the Bible
…spawned in that slime
Conceived by a pair of those monsters
Born of Cain
-From Beowulf in Burton Raffel’s fine translation
Eating crawfish is seasonally lawful
But I tell you true, they’re simply offal!
Lawrence Hall
Dispatches for the Colonial Office
Randolph
Scott at the Saturday Matinee on my Birthday
…and life's
rewards were chocolate bars and nickel bubble gum.
-Rod McKuen, “People
on Their Birthdays”
At 78 I am old enough again
To play with my Mattel Dream Car on
the lawn
Watch Randolph Scott at the Saturday
matinee
And dream of catching a freight
train out of town
My grandfather was 78 the summer I
was six
He was born in a wagon; he never
knew where
Manifest Destiny was an iron wheel
over the bones
Of the First Nations, and of mothers
who died young
We sat on the back steps while he
whittled
And spit tobacco into the grass, and
talked
And I don’t remember what he said
Or maybe what he said is in the wind
The passing of my dreaming barefoot summers
And of his life came as these things
do -
We turn around and find that the gates
of the past
Are shut against us and we don’t
know why
I hope that on some shimmering summer
day
Fishing poles on our shoulders
He’ll whistle up the dogs, and we’ll
away
(There’s
no rush – life is fun, and I haven’t yet visited the Kamakura Daibutsu!)
Lawrence Hall
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?)
Lawrence Hall
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.”
Lawrence Hall
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
Lawrence Hall & Nyquil ™
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!)
Lawrence Hall
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…?
