A Dignified Transfer - 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

 

A Dignified Transfer

 

Shocky and stunned, ears ringing in the sudden silence

Trembly hands scooping up meaty body parts

Meaty body parts, sticky blood, greedy flies

All into a baggy, a zippered body bag

 

A dignified transfer

 

A curvy fragment of skull, some kid’s curly hair

Is that…? yes…he was so funny…don’t think about it

The living already dusted off, the dead remain

Can we get them out tonight? I dunno, man

 

A dignified transfer

 

The president will execute his practiced salute

In a dignified transfer

                                            after the 18^th hole

Shimmering Summer Sun - a poor attempt at haiku

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

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

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Shimmering Summer Sun

 

Tired earth gasps for breath

Beneath this mid-summer sun

Bees buzz for a breeze

Hands without a Watch - 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

 

Hands without a Watch

 

 

Thanks to Mike Hauser for his idea about a watch without hands

 

 

Hands without a watch have nowhere to point

They are neither formless nor void, but still

But they cannot describe an orbit of time

Nor convey structure to a seeker of order

 

Hands without a watch have nowhere to go

Unloved they float without meaning or being

In desolate freedom without meaning or being

In emptiness without meaning or being

 

Hands without a watch cannot frame the ordinals

Or quantify the hours in ordered cardinals

An Existential Bus Ride on the Periphery of Heaven - 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

 

An Existential Bus Ride on the Periphery of Heaven

 

 

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

With your one wild and precious bus ticket?

 

-As Mary Oliver did not say in “The Summer Day”

 

 

Is this the right bus? Where are you going?

 

I boarded the bus outside Balboa Park

With Tolkien and Lewis smoking their pipes

 

Missed a stop along University Boulevard

Because I was listening to Pasternak

 

Got off the bus at Horton Plaza (there was no Hoo)

Because McKuen wanted to roam the rainy streets

 

Boarded again a few hours later, but

Spenser refused to sit next to a Catholic

 

I told him I really enjoyed The Faerie Queene anyway

He thanked me and autographed my death sentence

 

McMurtry said, “This ain’t Texas, you know;

You can’t even see Texas from the back of the bus”

 

Frankl replied, “But there is meaning in a bus”

De Chardin suggested that all bus-ness is coming together

 

Yevtushenko declared that the bus was all about him

Eliot thought there might not be a bus at all

 

My ticket ran out at Mission Beach, and so did I

Outside a bikini shop where the loungers ask

 

Not about the meaning of life, but rather

“Spare change? Spare change?”

When You and Your Server are from Different Centuries - 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

 

When You and Your Server are from Different Centuries

 

 

Diner: Coffee with sugar and cream. What’s your major?

 

Server: Finance. I plan to be a CPA.

 

Diner: That’s wonderful! I have trouble balancing my checkbook.

 

Server: Fresh coffee coming right up. What’s a checkbook?

Sitting by an Escape Hatch During the funeral - poem (of a sort...)

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

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

Home - Hello Poetry

 

Sitting by an Escape Hatch During the Funeral

 

 

                                                        “The dead without charity enclosed in craziness”

 

-As Henry V did not say

 

 

“Now let’s all take turns sharing our favorite memories of Daddy”

 

Y’all don’t know me but I’m his wife and I don’t drank and y’all know I don’t approve of drankin’ and I was married to somebody else when we met and he asked me for my phone number and I gave him a disconnected one but he wouldn’t give up and he asked my uncle for my number and my uncle asked my daddy and he said it was okay and I said I ain’t interested in you I’m married to the love of my life we was separated but I had them kids and he had his kids and Jesus knows the way and so we got married for forty seven years when we got married we had both been married so we asked if we was going to live just as brother and sister because of the kids and Lord knows we tried but Jesus knows the way and after a month we was really together and we was married forty-seven years and there’s a hell of an angel in heaven now yessir a hell of an angel in Heaven tonight and if anyone don’t like how I say it you know what you can do about it cause he was the best man ever and Jesus wanted us together…

 

 

And that is why you should sit in the back

By the door, ready to escape

A Black-Tie Dinner in Pandaemonium - White House Correspondents' Dinner

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

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

Home - Hello Poetry

 

 

A Black-Tie Dinner in Pandaemonium

 

 

                                             A dismal universal hiss, the sound

                                             Of public scorn

 

-Paradise Lost, Book IX.508-509

 

 

Submissive and obedient they came to sup

With weak applause for their glowering chief

(Whose courtiers listed those who did not show up)

Each quivered in fear like a trembling leaf