Tomatoes and Midday Cicadas - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Tomatoes and Midday Cicadas

 

 

Where are the songs of Spring?

 

-Keats

 

 

The tomatoes are split and discolored in the heat

Like bathing beauties who have beached too long

And gathering up the past totter home at dusk

Surprised to be all burnt and wrinkled with age

 

The sun of April who was a lusty lover

Caressing and warming their soft young skin

Is now a middle-aged man baring his chest

And seeking love in other vegetable beds

 

The cicadas of noon mourn in the withering heat

In remembrance of spring, youthful and sweet

Surgery in Three Parts - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Surgery in Three Parts

 

 

1 - Fear for Tomorrow

 

I don’t know what will happen to her tomorrow -

The anaesthesia and the surgical trauma

Invading all those organs compromised

Compromised by age and failing health

 

There’s a contract coffee bar in the lobby main

One could savour a coffee and a croissant

While waiting for a messenger of life or death

Does anyone know where the chapel is?

 

A marriage should not end in ICU

In the echoing chants of “Code Blue…Code Blue…”

 

2 - Fear for Today

 

Morning is filled with possibilities

But today…

Morning is fraught with possibilities

 

3 – Deo Gratias

 

The surgeon and the RN visit me

In a cold-as-a-morgue fluorescent-lit room

With their masks loose about their necks

To report that all went well

 

 

Bombs on the First Sunday in Summer - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Bombs – All Sizes

 

-As Jack Kerouac did not say

 

 

If we are all going to be destroyed…let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

 

-C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age,” 1948

 

 

Bombs fall tonight, but then they fall every night

Conceived over single-malt, born of the generals

Suffering not at all as their electronics systems

Guide them in the ways the Bible salesman deems

 

Bombs fall tonight, on a nuclear facility, they say

We can only ask the ashes and winds

While in our triumphalist Ozymandian presumption

We fancy that bombs will never fall on us

 

Bombs fall tonight – and have we been doing

Sensible and human things?

Chopsticks International - Rhyming Couplet

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Chopsticks International

 

Forgive me for any insensitive remarks

But do piano students in China practice “Forks?”

Will He Borrow Augusto Pinochet's Old Uniform? - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Will He Borrow Augusto Pinochet’s Old Uniform?

 

While reviewing his troops from his high platform

          Hup! Toop! Threep! Fourp!

Will Our Leader stand tall in uniform

          Right shoulder HARMS!

Glittery with medals and a shiny firearm

          Boom! Tiddy! Boom! Tiddy! Boom-Boom-Boom!

Swelling with pride in his goosestepping swarm

          Ta-ra-ra-BOOM-dee-ay!

Let Us Celebrate NO TYRANTS DAY - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Let Us Celebrate No Tyrants Day

 

 

“We have no king but Caesar!”

 

-A long-ago mob as written in St. John 19:15

 

 

Even the King of Kings is under the Law

And too, since Magna Carta, our earthly King -

From the people and their voices he can only draw

Such powers as their assemblies vote to bring

 

But may God protect us from a Common Man

Slithering to supremacy through serpentine speech

Emboldened by the power of cabal, club, and clan

Mobs chanting for their master, a soul-sucking leech

 

God gives us His grace in a King and Queen

Republics just give us the guillotine

Pushing the Envelope - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

Pushing the Envelope

 

What envelope is being pushed?

From whom to whom – across the room?

And why should it be pushed at all?

Is the envelope an English A-1?

An American business-size?

A birthday check for someone to steal?

Pushing a broom, pushing a sale

Pushing a pen – some sense in those

But what is the purpose in pushing

An envelope?

                             And did you stamp it?