A collection of poems by Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall
Christmas Without a Tree?
Not minding my own business I urged a tree
Yes, their children are gone
Yes, their children are grown
But the Christ-Child
is here
On This Feast of St. Stephen
If Good King Wenceslaus looked down today
He might well ask in irony if we
Have adequate food for these Twelve Days
With our leftover hams and yams and rolls
Coffee and tea, chocolates from Italy
Bread loaves so yeasty they incense the air
Potatoes and puddings and plates of cheese –
Our cry is, “I couldn’t eat another bite!”
So are the gifts we left on the Jesse Tree
For some poor man are all that they might be?
On the Day Papa Benedict Died
(Penned December 31, 2023)
This day a year ago Papa Benedict died
I heard it in a post-anaesthetic mist
Was there a TV in ICU? A radio?
Did someone say it? I don’t remember now
I knew only that Papa Benedict had died
That I was alive, and didn’t know why
Little toy cowboys rode across my mind
But in my lungs the air was sweet and cold
Papa Benedict had something to do with it
And Saint Elizabeth of Thuringen
And I am thankful
Gandhi, Churchill, and Shakespeare Wrote a New Year’s Resolution
(I Mean, Like, I Read it Somewhere, Okay?)
Be the cliché-sodden, inaccurate,
and unsourced quote you always wanted to be
Dropping Stuff at Midnight for the Gregorian New Year
(The Julian calendar is so old that it’s a Boomer thing)
I don’t know why people drop things at midnight:
A ball of electric lights in New York
A single light bulb as a gag somewhere else
As The People chant in unison, “WOO! WOO!”
Maybe this year they’ll drop a flaming car
Its finely-crafted batteries on fire
Torching the holy QAnon tee-shirt stand
As foretold in the House of Representatives
(Yawn)
Couldn’t all of this wait until daylight?
I don’t know why people drop things at midnight
Colin Cloute on the First of January
“And now is come thy wynters stormy state,
Thy mantle mard, wherein thou maskedst late”
-Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, “Januarye,” 23-25
The calendar year is advertised as new
But the slanting, yellowing sun is old
Almost weepy-eyed, exhausted, and weak
Beyond the icy cirrhus clouds of dusk
In a few weeks I will turn over the garden soil
A mediaeval ploughman with his electric tiller
Following the ancient seasons of the English year
Anticipating Lent and Eastertide
For now, the fireside and a comforting page
And a cuppa for warming the bones of age
LogoSophia Magazine 