The Poetry of William Hammett: March 2025

Monday, March 31, 2025

Singapore Sweeper

I saw the black woman,
missing one eye and a finger,
sweeping the airport in Singapore,
humming and smiling
as if she were a queen
or a monk minus the orange.
Instead of raking a gravel garden,
she moved dust this way and that,
swirling patterns of the cosmos
for all I know, spiral galaxies
or mandalas intended for the trash bin’s hat.
She saw me and bowed,
and I returned the vow
to the sisterhood that keeps time
and orders the accoutrements of place
so that every space may have a rhyme.
The wooden broom
was her shepherd’s crook,
her bandana a holy veil.
She was invisible to most,
but I suspect that she was revelation.
I know that she was God.

~William Hammett

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Monday, March 24, 2025

Merlin

I spied him in Wales
atop a broken castle, his cape
whipping in wizard wind
above pale parapet stones
ground into uneven history.
Other times I saw him
reflected in rainy day puddles,
a beard of brazen branches,
or white clouds dusting the moon.
Later, I saw him at a strip mall
in New Jersey, opening a magic shop,
his black robes embossed
with signs of the zodiac and caught
on the door of his rusted pickup truck.
He waved a satin scarf
and shook out dime store magic
for buck-tooth kids with lazy eyes
that hoped against hope it was real.
“Hard time for wizards?” I asked.
“I’m still on the clock,” he said.
“The wheel of time’s a bitch,
and the world has grown so blind.”
I walked away and turned. “Wales?”
He winked and pulled a crumb from his beard.
“A trick of the mind, son.
Like everything, a trick of the mind.”

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, March 18, 2025

The New Language of Love

There is the great dying of the day,
the falling of the bloated orange sun
into a sea that is too blue to be real,
the wafer dipped into the chalice, as it were.
Purple and violet fire breaks out along the horizon.
The day is quenched, and the steam
that rises from the line where water meets sky
becomes the blackest void, the empty mind of God
until a thousand million stars appear,
the brilliant but silent seraphim,
and it is all made possible because you and I,
holding hands and nothing more,
are standing barefoot on the sandy shore,
a light sea breeze tossing our hair
and teaching us the new language of love.