Evil is Afraid of You - poem

  

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Evil is Afraid of You

 

That in the world which is evil despises you

Mostly because you never give up
Evil sends you hopeless dreams and despair

And leaves your pillow stained with sour tears

 

That in the world which is evil despises you

Because in the morning you wake up strong

Greet the new day with your own songs of hope

And work at your purposes with joyful intent

 

That in the world which is evil despises you

Because it can never be you

The Doomsday Clock and Watch Collection - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

The Doomsday Clock and Watch Collection

 

Since 1947 the image of a doomsday clock

Has haunted our dreams and possibilities

First nuclear war, then global cooling

Then global warming, and now A EYE

 

If we continue to date and time our doom

Let’s have it as an app, or a clever watch

Strapping the end of time to our wrists

Or entombed in an Orwellian telescreen

 

The Doomsday Clock has been frozen for eighty years -

Let’s wear as a fashion our existential fears

Poetry is an Uncommon God - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Poetry is an Uncommon Good

 

Thanks to Nat and Friends

 

Poetry is a common good

Like dreams and water and earth and air

What graces might bless us if we would

Be grateful for each as an answered prayer

Texas A & M University and Mickey Mouse's Dog - doggerel

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

LogoSophia Magazine – A Pilgrim's Journal of Life, Literature and Love

 

Texas A & M University and Mickey Mouse’s Dog

 

 

                    Private Joe Gomez: “What you readin'?”

 

                    Private Marion Hotchkiss: “Plato.”

 

                    Joe: “You mean they wrote a whole big book about Mickey Mouse's dog?”

 

-Leon Uris, Battle Cry

 

 

Texas A & M has banished wise Plato

(Some colonel is shaking in his aiguilette)

Shoved philosophy out through the old North Gate-O

(Asking questions scares the admin soviet)

 

We mustn’t teach thinking on the Texas plains

Or read the books that our ancestors wrote

That kept us free from cruel tyrants’ chains -

No Plato, now, and maybe soon no vote

 

A university no more; that how it looks -

Their homecoming bonfire now is for burning books

 

 

NB: In the long-ago A & M rightly dropped my lazy (self) for skipping class.  I wasn’t allowed to skip class in Viet-Nam, and that was a sterner lesson.

 

Texas A&M deems Plato unnecessary for approved thought

 

Texas A&M blocks readings on gender ideology in philosophy class: 'Plato has been censored'

 

Texas A&M flags parts of Plato readings as violations of new anti-gender theory policy

 

Texas A&M Warns Professor Not to Teach Plato Because of Gender Rules - The New York Times

 

Texas A&M Forbids A Plato Reading In An Intro Philosophy Course

Crawfish are not in the Bible - rhyming couplete

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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!

Randolph Scott at the Saturday Matinee on my Birthday - poem

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

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!)

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?)