Book Shops Offer Us Civilizations
Book shops offer us civilizations
Democracies of the living and the dead –
Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, and you
Over cups of coffee wrangling meter and rhyme…
Tag: Mack in Texas
The Chainsaw Days of September
These are the chainsaw days, humid and hot
Wind-blasted shingles and wind-blasted trees
And clearing windfall in the gasping heat:
Litter to the burn-piles, firewood to the stacks…
A Review of Hugh Lofting’s ‘Victory for the Slain’
There is much more to Hugh Lofting than conversing with rabbits and squirrels – after all, everyone does that. In 1942 Lofting wrote his one adult work, Victory for the Slain.
Read MoreWeathering Plague-Time and Hurricanes
…But this year all your friends fit into cubes
On the computer screen at your kitchen table
And you hope your stupid brother won’t dance
Across the room in his Captain Marvel underwear…
In Media Res All Is Chaos
Maybe I disappoint, but now I prefer
That safe distance Yevtushenko condemned
Because in media res all is chaos
The immediacy of emotion and pain…
Two Cones
And now two cones are moving up the coast
Maybe tomorrow they’ll move back down again
While we stack toilet paper and MREs
Perhaps the ice cream truck’s an ice cream float…
A Statue of Our Favorite War Hero
Let us build a statue of Sergeant Schultz
Standing bravely at the door of Baracke 2
With a bouquet of flowers in one mighty hand
And a slice of apple strudel in the other…
Your Job is Essential
Some say this is the age of the coronavirus. Perhaps it is, but more than that this is the age of incoherence. No one agrees on what the killer virus is, where it came from, masks or not masks, isolation or congregation, work or no work, treatments, dubious medicines (Macbeth IV:1), numbers of deaths, or the utility of borders (Richard II II:1)
Read MoreSummer of the Blue Helmets
Sergeant Schneider barked at us, his young heroes
And made us crawl the beach at Oceanside
And tho’ he made each day’s harsh training1 sting
One evening at Mass we heard sweet children sing…
Behind the Mask
A collection of poems by Lawrence “Mack in Texas” Hall
We mourn the passing of poor Joe Draper
Crushed by falling cases of toilet paper
And though poor Joe had fever, ‘flu, and gout,
It was the toilet paper that wiped him out
