Another night smotherest sun and day.
We playest cards for fun by candlelight.
Henceforth shalt it remain to be this way,
to never be plagued by another's plight.
I goest by the moon and stars for sport,
a hunt in wood during the darkest hour.
My greatest loyal friend protects my court,
my love sleeps soundly in the safest tower.
When I returnest on steed whence I came,
I see the smoke and rush back to my home.
My castle is consumed by growing flame;
my love hangs limply from the reddened stone.
My friend, no more, thou gaze upon it all
as the spark of fire and my dukedom's fall.

Thou dolt!  Buffoon!  Barbaric fool!  Thou hast betrayed my trust.
I stagger through the sundered stone in rooms where we'd imbibe
and cry upon the sullied ground 'midst things that hadst combust.
Enraged, I screamest in my home surrounded by thy lies.

4 haïkus across the laverie

Sun is on the stone
Wind on my face in dukedom
Seagulls glide above

Clothes are being washed
Below Caen’s castle stone walls
The wind brisk, face lit

Empty bench for bones
Aching from forceful moving
I rest in the sun

Towers and steeples
Golden over grey traffic
Two worlds touch yet not.

Lawrence Hall
[email protected]
Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                                 The Season of Back-To-School

                When Americans seize books from their children
    and form charitable committees to give them backpacks instead

A great many people did not say the following:

Once you have read a backpack you care about, some part of it is always with you. – Louis L’Amour

These backpacks gave Matilda a hopeful and comforting message: you are not alone. -Roald Dahl

Good friends, good backpacks, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. ― Mark Twain

If there's a backpack that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. ― Toni Morrison

“Classic” - a backpack which people praise and don't read. ― Mark Twain

When I have a little money, I buy backpacks; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes. ― Erasmus of Rotterdam

I cannot live without backpacks. ― Thomas Jefferson

If you have a garden and a backpack, you have everything you need. ― Cicero

No backpack is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond. ― C.S. Lewis

A backpack, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe. ― Madeleine L'Engle

And on the subject of burning backpacks: I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength or their powerful political connections or their great wealth, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain backpacks from their shelves, and have refused to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those backpacks.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries. ― Kurt Vonnegut

Do you ever read any of the backpacks you burn? ― Ray Bradbury

You don’t have to burn backpacks to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them – Ray Bradbury

Knowing I loved my backpacks, he furnish’d me
From mine own library with backpacks that
I prize above my dukedom – Prospero in The Tempest I.ii.166-168

A troop of goats trot triple-time down a valley road,
a machinery of bells threshing the mountain air.
Little breaks the silence of the rural dukedom where
we reside. What does, gains immediate notice.

It is the happening of the moment passing through
to another place to pasture, the *******
Of the seasons. Though meadows burst with Kelly green,
and no trees have dropped their leaves, it is
autumn’s inaugural, where clouds hug the earth, mountains
curry themselves, goats scurry to new homes.

We, too, have shifted homes for a respite from the mundane.
The new now advertises surprise: This will not
appear elsewhere, will not last long enough to forget
where we came. With time, we follow the goatherd’s
abrupt call and hope to be rewarded with a golden bell.