By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … When we were children we were proud of our new shoes / Our once-a-year shoes in situational poverty / Although we went barefootin’ most of the time / As long as the weather and parents allowed
By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … Life is a pilgrimage from cell to cell: / The bedroom of one’s childhood, the college dorm / The noisy barracks, merry in spite of all / Eighty conscript soldiers bunked out in rows
By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … A child and a puppy playing on the lawn / Tumbling through soft grass in the bliss of June / We joy in their celebration of life / Everything is new / Except that it isn’t
By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall …when outside at dusk with poetry and pipe / And a whisper of single-malt offered to the earth / Sometimes I seem to see visions proper to a Celt / And hear soft songs from the dawn of time
By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … A little moppet scampers around the tee / Waving her plastic bat as a warrior’s sword / Or as a fairy-wand to magic the day / Her first-ever tee-ball lesson with Dad…
By Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall … Lawn chairs are for lawn-sitting quite at our ease / Soft summer evenings with a book and a glass / With birds and squirrels chittering away / Merrily over their supper of chicken scratch
We repudiate Putin and all his works / And all his pomps and all his engines of death / And all his malignant servile orcs / Who crucify humanity with lies
Yes, they are awkward, those poems written in shapes / But if God writes our lives as poetry / Limned and formed for our continuation / We ask that He shape us with clarity and charity
Everybody writes about the moon / Often trying to force a balky rhyme / Along the continuum of spoon and croon / Which just won’t fill the bill, the quill, or the time
Brave seedlings from last year’s sunflowers arise / Among the tiny wings of zinnia buds / And the pushy skunk cabbages who hang around / Like playground bullies who ought to go find jobs
“Follow the science” is itself an unscientific expression, personifying science as a sort of cosmic Boy Scout troop leader or perhaps a soldier taking the point. It suggests that we should not follow our hearts (which is just as illogical), our music, our dreams, or anything else except science personified almost as a deity.
No, no, we are not banks of blinking lights / And random teletype-type taps and beeps / Like Patrick McGoohan’s educational General / Or George Jetson’s mainframe at Spacely Sprockets
The panther-like litheness of my youth (cough) long ago expanded into the, oh, prosperous look of Chaucer’s merchant, and so I have gotten into the excellent but Calvinistic habit of, well, treading along a treadmill every day.
The Thought became Incarnate in Judaea / And thoughts become incarnate in the books we read / For thoughts are tabernacles of our hopes / Tents in the deserts of our wanderings
An artist writes about the consumption of art / As if a painting, a poem, a video / A statue in the lobby of the medical center / Were a tin of meatballs and spaghetti
In the long ago I was reading a book / (And doubtless thinking many brilliant thoughts) / Sitting in my car outside Our Lady’s Church / Waiting for some old-lady meeting to end