Sam Hamill

July 15, 2021

“To Eron on Her 32nd Birthday” by Sam HamillPosted by

Sam Hamill

TO ERON ON HER 32ND BIRTHDAY

When the last shadow
of the forest vanishes
under the broad wings
of the last river falcon,

I will be alone again.
All the rain forests,
the endangered species and
flora and fauna

bearing testimony found
in hydrocarbons of stone …
going, going, gone.
Thus all our good intentions

are moving along—
their going is our going,
each bound to the other by
shared impermanence.

There’s nothing that’s not Nature.
And yet we are moved
almost to tears by the thought
of the last salmon or whale,

last wolf in the wild,
last California condor.
With a veil of tears
we shroud the dead we’ve tortured,

building great castles of sand.
Here at Kage-an,
we’ve golden and black bamboo,
white blossoming moss,

dark-leafed Japanese maple,
irises just being born—
emptiness in each,
as in this transient world.

Rexroth asked whether
meaning has being. I ask
how tall can the foxglove grow.
How long can the crow

strut his stuff, or the robin
continue to sing
the sun down under the earth?
I want to live a moment

in that song, to die
in that moment afterward,
when daylight has gone,
the world embalmed with silence

until the first marsh frog calls.
How much grief can one
life sustain?—ask the Rabbi
of Auschwitz who died

with his dignity intact,
or ask Chuang Tzu who laughs
loud at the question.
“I am not ashamed,” Merwin

wrote in a poem,
“of the wren’s murders nor the
badger’s dinners on which all
worldly good depends.”

Apologies to the slug
dissolving slowly
in the garden, and to the
mosquito thoughtlessly slapped;

and praise to the rice,
praise to the wine and to songs
that follow after;
and praise for our suffering

which ennobles all our joys.
I have no wisdom
to offer on your birthday,
but here is a song

to celebrate emptiness,
to celebrate years to come.
When I come at last
to be a passing shadow,

I’ll sound like a whale,
and plunge deep into the past.
We are devoid, Hayden says,
of essences, thus

neither young nor old, male nor
female, flesh nor stone.
Happy birthday, my dear one.
What outlasts us is our love.

—from Rattle #8, Winter 1997

__________

Sam Hamill: “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.” (web)

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April 17, 2018

“Eyes Wide Open” by Sam HamillPosted by

Sam Hamill

EYES WIDE OPEN

The little olive-skinned girl
peered up at me
from the photograph

with her eyes wide open,

deep brown beautiful eyes
that bore silent witness
to a grief as old as the ages.

She was young,
and very beautiful, as only
the young can be,
but within such beauty
as bears calamity silently:

because it has run out of tears.

I closed the magazine and went
outside to the wood pile
and split a couple of logs, thinking,
“Her fire is likely
an open fire tonight,
bright flames licking
and waving

like rising pennants in the breeze.”

When I was a boy,
I heard about the bloodshed
in Korea, about the Red Army
perched at our threshold,
and the bombs
that would annihilate our world

forever.

I got under my desk with the rest of the foolish world.

In Okinawa, I wore the uniform

and carried the weapon
until my eyes began to open,
until I choked
on Marine Corps pride,
until I came to realize
just how willfully I had been blind.

How much grief is a life?
And what can be done unless
we stand among the missing, among the murdered,
the orphaned,
our own armed children, and bear witness

with our eyes wide open?

When I was a child, frightened of the night
and crying in my bed,
my father told me a poem or sang,

“Empty saddles in the o-l-d corral,
where do they r-i-d-e tonight.”

Homer thought the dead arrived
into a field of asphodels.
“Musashino,” near Tokyo, means
“Musashi’s Plain,”
the warrior’s way washed in blood.

The war-songs are sung
to the same old marching measures—
oh, how we love to honor the dead.

A world without war? Who but a child or a fool
could imagine such a thing?

Corporate leaders go to school
on Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
“We all deplore it,” the President says,
issuing bombing orders,
“but God is on our side.”

Which blood is Christian,
which Muslim, Jew or Hindu?

The beautiful girl with the beautiful sad eyes
watches, but
has not spoken. What can she

possibly say?
She carries the burden of finding
another way.

In her eyes, the ruins, the fear,
the shoes that can’t be filled, hands
that will never stroke her hair.

But listen. And you will hear her small, soft, plaintive voice
—it’s already there within you—

a heartbeat, a whisper,
a promise broken—
if only you listen

with your eyes wide open.

—from Rattle #25, Summer 2006

[download audio]

__________

Sam Hamill: “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.” (website) Note: Recording courtesy of Michael Ladd. First aired on Poetica Radio, June 23, 2007.

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November 13, 2012

“After a Winter of Grieving” by Sam HamillPosted by

Sam Hamill

AFTER A WINTER OF GRIEVING

Before I traveled my road I was my road.
—Antonio Porchia

No road leads the way.
The road follows behind.
—Takamura Kotaro

With the moon so bright,
I could not sleep, the garden
glowing in cold white light.

I rose, dressed, and went out
to the deck to sit in the cold and think.

The April moon was full and high,
almost big enough to burst,
haloed by a ring of sparkling light
and a few bright stars.

The garden Buddha, a pretty boy,
wore an apron of moss.

The old Moon Watching Pavilion,
where I watched this moon with my daughter
nearly thirty years ago,
rots under the katsura tree.

I watched the first gray light begin to seep
through the trees before
the first robin arrived. Each gain,
each loss, had a name I could not speak.

Denise called this, “A kind
of Paradise,” this logged-off scrappy land
I came to thirty years ago,
impoverished by my needs.

Paradise is a sometime thing,
wherever one might make it—
a river of stones, bamboo, a foreign tree,
building a home alone—

and this same old moon,
eternally new
in geologic time.

The road to Kage-an is gone.
Don’t ask me where I’ve been.
The road out is the road in.

—from Rattle #22, Winter 2004

__________

Sam Hamill: “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.” (website)

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November 6, 2012

“Amerika, Mon Amour (2003)” by Sam HamillPosted by

Sam Hamill

AMERIKA, MON AMOUR (2003)

The fascist in the White House can’t hear,
can’t see the faces of the suffering he authors,
nor can his brother, Saddam the Tyrant,
who remains in hiding, his finger still pulling a trigger.
All the little Caesars build their evil empires
of blood and castles made of sand. But empires
crumble, while the misery continues. Tyrants rise
and fall, and poets tell their stories.

In America, they’ve named a new poet laureate.
Caesars love their clowns, their little amusements.
But the poet from Baghdad continues in exile,
in Paris, and for twenty years couldn’t call home
to his mother, and in Piacenza sings, “Baghdad, Mon Amour,”
and his voice never trembles. Even a little truth
can prove deadly. Nevertheless he’ll one day
return to his home again, and the sweetness of his song,
more beautiful than silence, will lift me in its arms
because I will join him in Baghdad, mon amour,
because poets and people are brothers, sisters in the skin,
and because fascists can’t live forever.

Salah al Hamdani, your name and your song
is my prayer. It’s true, blood flows like oil
and burns like oil, and it’s the children who perish
for your tyrant and for mine. All the Caesars hunger
after money and power. All their empires
fall. Salah al Hamdani, I invoke your name
and kiss your cheek here in Piazza Duomo
because the dead have no names in Amerika,
the dead in Baghdad, the dead in Kabul.
The dead, the dead and the dying.
And those who merely survive.

Our Italian nights are full of wine and talk
and love. We have nothing but our songs
to stand against Caesar’s throne and his call
for blood. Old men should fight the wars. But
it’s always the innocent we send to annihilate
the innocent, filling their heads with lies.

The fascist in the White House sleeps well
most nights, guards at every door. Saddam is in
his castle or his cave, his guards guarding too.
The White House poet sleeps. Salah, what
can we tell them, what can we do to disturb these
sleeping giants? Italy is a world from ours, and ours
a world the Caesars and their jesters never knew.

Salaam, Salah al Hamdani. I invoke
your name to name the nameless, I invoke
your song to bring us all back home.

—from Rattle #22, Winter 2004

__________

Sam Hamill: “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.” (website)

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November 1, 2012

“To Yoshinaga Sayuri” by Sam HamillPosted by

Sam Hamill

TO YOSHINAGA SAYURI

What’s an old man say
to beautiful roses from
such a great lady?
I was astonished, struck dumb,
my poet’s tongue tied numbly.

But it’s not roses,
the greatest gift you gave me.
No. It’s Sadako.
Folding all her paper cranes.
You gave me a thousand cranes.

You gave me the work
of finding joy making peace.
Sadako, dying,
folding cranes, radiation
ravaging her small body—

such joy in sadness,
such sadness in seeking joy.
What our ancestors
have done to one another
cannot ever be excused.

And yet we are here.
Me grateful for your kindness,
silent, embarrassed.
You are a great actress and
a noble human being.

I’m a fool poet
grown white-haired in the shadows
of Hiroshima,
In Chris’s shakuhachi,
I felt, I believed, your hand,

but I could not write
the poem for Sadako
afterward. Oh, I
wanted to, I struggled to,
but could not write the poem.

What I cannot write…
to… for… about… the victims
of Hiroshima,
I found in Yusuke’s father’s
carving ten thousand Buddhas.

I found it in you.
Kawabata would be moved
by your elegant
control of consummate grief.
How classically Japanese!

I write this for you
in a Japanese measure,
with just a little
American jazz or blues
contained in every line.

Your roses will bloom
somewhere in my heart and mind
when I fail again.
I too have a crush on you,
one among millions of fans.

Your gift was rarer,
a Buddha smile for the ghost
of a holocaust.
Nine bows, my sensei. Gassho.
That lesson will not be lost.

—from Rattle #22, Winter 2004

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July 9, 2012

“On Being Invited to Submit Poems ‘Written in the Manner of the Ancient Chinese Mountain Recluse Poets'” by Sam HamillPosted by

Sam Hamill

ON BEING INVITED TO SUBMIT POEMS “WRITTEN IN THE MANNER OF THE ANCIENT CHINESE MOUNTAIN RECLUSE POETS”

From my windows on this hill,
Fidalgo Bay, green islands, pale blue sky
and, far off, Koma Kulshan, crowned
with icy snow—first and only words
I know in the Lummi tongue.

Thirty-five years in the woods,
watching the tree-trunks thicken.
And now this view, this vision.

—from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets

[download audio]

__________

Sam Hamill: “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.” (website)

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May 11, 2009

“Cairo Qasidah” by Sam HamillPosted by

Sam Hamill

CAIRO QASIDAH

A slow gray-yellow dawn
beyond the slow brown Nile,
a heavy haze over Cairo

as I stood in my window
remembering how we paused
on a bridge, Amal and I,
in fading evening light
last night
to watch a lean fisherman
and his beautiful wife
cast their net along
the stony shallows just
as they have done
for five thousand years,
their small son happy
astern, fingers trailing
in the water while Momma
pulled the long slow oars
and Pappa drew up
emptiness again.

“Just wait!” they called to us.
And began again.

I rose in the hour before first light
having dreamt of them all
in troubled sleep all night—
a world caught
between antiquity
and modern life.
What kindness shone
in Amal’s brown eyes
when she spoke of
her son, of her husband.
A little archaeology
of the heart may be
sublime—or raise
a veil of tears.

Her smart young son is teased
when she declines
to wear the hijab. The rules
set against the erotic
create the erotic—the rules
of war are found
in a woman’s hair.

The five o’clock call to prayer.
An infidel in every tongue,
I closed my window, turning
back to solitude again,
to sit alone and breathe.

Soon enough the streets
will snarl to life and the world
go about its brutal business.
What business have I
whose commerce is the gift
of words, mere poetry?
War and peace, love
and exile—a mother’s love
or a poet’s dreaming—

what words do we dare stand by?
For what good word
does the good soldier die?
What can any weary
traveler do but live
in wonderment and gratitude
amidst such poverty and splendor—

And I walked out into the dust
that veils the city,
enlivens the sunrise,
and will, soon enough, veil us.

—from Rattle #27, Summer 2007

__________

Sam Hamill: “I grew up on a ranch in Utah, a farm in Utah, and my old man, my adopted father, loved poetry. And he would sometimes recite poetry while he worked. And he would explain to me, the rhythm of the work would help you decide what poem to sort of say. The way you sometimes hum or sing when you work—well, he recited poetry that way, and I think that was what first turned me on to poetry.” (website)

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