BY LAWRENCE HALL

30 September 2023

“Make it so, Number One”

  • Star Trek, The New Generation (often)

Up at 0630 with coffee and Tuxedo-Cat

In the west-fading light of the still-full moon

To watch and hear and feel and touch and taste

The waning of night, the beginning of day

The air was cool, the grass was damp, the birds—

The birds were LOUD, fussing from tree to tree

An old lawn chair, layers of paint over rust

Was our captaincy over possibilities

“Is all well, Number One?” I asked the cat

He blinked his eyes that the world was ready to sail

Wake Up, Back Yard!

Wake up, back yard! The day is warm and bright

The water hoses are stiff, the nozzles are fouled

And I’m stiff too, but we are called by the morning light

To celebrate this spring-before-spring day

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

The yellow pollen teases through my nose

And everywhere this happy new year grows!

Awarded the Chair of Poetry at a Leafy Rural Tree

Among its ancient gifts are acorns and leaves

But the most generous stipend is peace

Oh, sure, we have our academic rivalries—

Just last night a raccoon occupied the chair

And the cardinals and jays squawk a bit

Mostly about seeds, seldom about verse

For arguing with Keats and Yevtushenko

Is my great pleasure and duty, not theirs

Who knew—

That an old steel chair dragged onto the lawn

Could be a center of civilization?

The Existential Despair in Replacing a Lawnmower Battery

My language is blue and my knuckles bleed—

I can never find the wrench I need!

Who Has Been Eating My Chair?

(Which Goldilocks did not ask)

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 

Lawn chairs are presumably not nutritious

But every morning mine has been gnawed away more

Its cotton cover shredded and ripped and torn

The puffy filler scattered all over the lawn

What creatures in the night fight, chew, and riot

To make my comfortable old chair their diet?