The Poetry of William Hammett

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Except to Say That It Was Good

Long ago
I sat on a levee
near a bayou
by the lake
under the night sky
and full moon.
There was a bus
with lighted windows
behind tall pine trees
and April grass
with fish jumping
every few minutes
or so with a splash
as I recall.
There was another
beside me so soft
and I inhaled deeply
the air and the stars
and the hint of perfume.
That was the way
it happened
on many evenings
so quiet
and it now surfaces
in dreams
or odd moments
that travel across time.
There is, I think,
not much to say
except that it was
so very very good.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, September 30, 2026

Brain Chatter

Neurons doing the mambo sixty thousand times a day
Shakedown shakedown neuroplastic barn, surgical hay
hey nonny nonny no and oh by the way I taught Shakespeare
but that was a long-time brain chatter rain shatter
what is all this nowhere nowhere just run and hide your head
and you might as well be dead but no that’s not what I meant
it is word nudity Ginsberg and Joyce on steroids
but the licorice pizza keeps making amends
and I am not the walrus but I know who was
oh Carly Simon you was hot and called to say
happy birthday as a favor in a galaxy far far away
and how about those shrinkings and Harrison
but not Bergeron as in Vonnegut who knew
the inside out of life and cracked the code but
does anyone read literary fiction in the age of man
half a million strong with the New York State Thruway
closed man can you dig it ladies and gentlemen
Crosby Stills and Nash a little less bottom end
on the guitar please it’s getting to the point
where word salad is the entrée and of course
the main course is Ducks Newburyport
in the longest damn novel and I’m going for it
rain shatter who the hell is Quigly I remember
mama and George Goebel a photographic memory
but not like Poppy’s playing I wonder wonder who’s
kissing her now and how now brown feasibility study
by the fucklehead evangelicals who say the world
is going to end because they never looked at the sky
and the earth ain’t flat well well St. Paul was such a drag
I mean get laid dude and don’t let me down
the rooftop concert was pretty maybe I’m amazed
but I’ve seen the horse throat billy goat
on the road less traveled oh my that one that one poem
is spot on and burns and hurts like “wrong way Corrigan”
and I’m pretty rain in Spain and then there’s
Molly Bloom yes I said yes I will yes
pardon the intrusion James but I say yes
and you say no and Ulysses will keep sailing
after the war because he is too restless to hang it up
and that’s where I stand not gently into the night
and any road will take me there amen.

~William Hammett

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Friday, September 18, 2026

Sailing Wine-Dark Seas

You wore the black cowl of a monk,
but the pine bed was open only at the top.
It was you, but your lips were pale
and the makeup was so white.
Your hands were clasped
in contemplation or maybe prayer,
but was there any thought
in the cold clay destined for dust?
Was the glass half empty or half full?
I could not tell.

The warriors viewed the hero’s stillness

and chanted words by the wild flames

that turned the night yellow with shame.

A Geatish woman with hair bound up

sang a dirge for the coming days

without the man she’d known as lord.

They had fashioned a funeral pyre

for Beowulf the brave,

slayer of dragons and Grendel,
hung it with helmets, shields, and armor

and treasure from their days

when blood gave color to the cheek

and strength to the bones.

The smoke curled, unfurled a soul

from black cherrywood dropping embers

onto the holy runic stones.

I shall put aside my iron tools,

shall cease carving figures out of wood,

shall stop trying to reconcile

twenty-first century riddles and lack of bile,

its should or could or would.

Rather, I shall sail wine-dark seas.

Perhaps you live in the land

that dips below sunset’s horizon

where the ocean quietly rolls

into that we which we cannot understand.

Perhaps we shall meet, or not.

I toast you with mead,

you, who were in the lead

by a handful of years

so as to eat the bread

and drink from cups of blood.

Brother, where art thou?

Sailing in the wine-dark seas.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, September 8, 2026

They

They say wonders never cease.
Who is they,
this multitude in a plural pronoun
that weighs in, tips the scale,
knows jack about everything but Jill?
No matter.
They are probably wrong.
The gnarled oak root
grabs the postman by the ankles
through a crack in the sidewalk,
sending him to the emergency room,
letters from Paris and Peoria
carried by a carefree wind
that has no dog in the fight
over the perpetuation of wonder.
The final farewell from Ellen
to Maurice splits his heart in two forever.
The check from Uncle Henry
to cover the chemo is deposited
in the nearest sinking sewer,
and the boy dies with a moth-eaten pancreas.
Wonder? Wonder? Isn’t it a pity.
They say this and they say that.
They are dumber than rocks
and as invisible as a bilgewater rat.
They are naysayers, morons, pantaloons
who don’t know the price of rice
though the claim whispered at meals
is that honey cures the plague.
I wonder who they are.
I wonder if there is such a thing as wonder.
Lost in thought,
my ideas are cartoon bubbles,
and I am nothing more than they.

~William Hammett

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Monday, August 31, 2026

Crickets

crickets rub their legs
together in the night

I am in them

and they are in me

merry-go-round

and spin the bottle

of holy holy chirp wine

sing the whore dance

the rubbing of legs

against spindles of bone

and raw pink Venus flesh

vampires born into the night

in New York stone canyons

but who can blame them

thrust into the world

from a cricket’s birth canal

their day job to sleep

and by night to hustle

with leather skirt and boots

so who can blame them

who can blame them

there but for the grace

go you and I

~William Hammett

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Friday, August 21, 2026

Old Hyms

The old hymns have drifted away,
have found new homes and are silent now.
They do not reach the glorious sky

or Moses or Abraham or Isaac

or a bejeweled city with twelve gates.

There is no longer a ladder for them to climb.

The rock of ages sits in a museum in Philly.

The old rugged cross, worse for the wear,

is part of the Johnson home’s frame

in Kansas, part of a load-bearing wall.

The garden where he walked and talked

was weeded and made into a park

where old men play chess before they die.

The roll meant to be called up yonder

is a dusty scroll at the Smithsonian,

an example of early Sumerian writing.

The people who sang them on Sunday mornings,

the ones with suits and ties, bonnets and bows

and hair parted with Brylcreem,

are sitting on tombstones or waiting,

always waiting, in nursing homes

for Cotton Mather or Jonathan Edwards

to sweep them into severe glory

and puffy clouds devoid of laughter.

Besides, their throats are dry

and their tongues too cracked and worn

to make a joyful noise unto the sagging rafters.

~William Hammett

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Monday, August 10, 2026

Saint Bartholomew's Widow

He was always running after the dust of Galilee
and its pious announcements and fables
and the carpenter shaman who spit on the blind
and threw people into pools to make them walk.
I was left to clean and raise his children
while he followed the moon-eyed lepers
and their craving for smooth skin and prophecy.
A pox on them all, the seventy-two
and the twelve who rowed the boat
and caught his fish for the outdoor picnic show.
There were whores enough to satisfy his needs
since his master was clever at sowing
and reaping the leftover weeds and seed.
Just as good that I wasn’t the one to catch his disease.
And then the whole lot gets beaten and nailed,
or maybe just three—not that I cared, or care.
He came home only once to shake my shoulders
and shout “He’s not there, he’s not there!”
I was left to clean and marry off his fry,
to scrub my fingers to the bone, to cry.
Oh, it was rich to find he’d run to India,
babbling to the fakirs and the gurus there,
the swamis and turbans and the Tantric sex.
Fie, for all the good it did. They didn’t care.
Years ago I heard the tale that my bastard mate
was preaching and got stoned by local folk
when his sleight-of-hand didn’t lift the yolk.
The deaf couldn’t hear and the fevers didn’t break.
It was all a sham, a rolling of the bones
to take his clothes and the teeth still left
in a mouth flapping its gums about heaven
and some kingdom floating in a desert mirage.
I had to cook and clean and work for pennies.
I had to prostitute myself before the bread could leaven.

~William Hammett

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Friday, July 31, 2026

Blue Snow at Twilight

The snow, still falling, is blue in the evening,
beautiful, and yet it divides my heart.
Is it the holy baptism of heavenly water,
pure and uniform over gables and bare trees,
or a pall covering a stage worn by actors
who have played their parts for a million years?
Most have retired, and the reviews proclaim
that the playwright is a hack who knows no shame.
But still, but still
I believe that such muted tones
and the sweep of a brush into monochrome
is too beautiful, too silent, too still, still, still
to be anything but what it is and nothing more.
Perhaps a goddess has let down her hair for the night
and is combing blue stars unused from the start
and cooled by Olympian love and a generous heart.
But no, I think that it is snow at twilight,
fractals that have come to blanket the world
because it is what they do this time of year
and nothing more, nothing more.

~William Hammett

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Friday, July 24, 2026

Homeless Moon

When we have raked the gravel over tombs
into a single desert under the red sun,
and all lie below gray ash and waste
except for the bleached bones of Ezekiel
hoping to reboot green in a tender Tigris garden,
what will the silver eye do next?
What lovers will it bless and make fertile
once Verona has seen the death of all Capulets
and the stone of jungle Buddhas has been chanted
into dharma dust that is fine and gray and lunar,
a mirror for the last surviving lens
circling the dead wheel of gainless Gaia
rolling through dark matter and the void?
A sonnet without rhyme, poetry sans love,
the inspiration of foam and pull and tides,
the moon will wander over wasted time,
over the planet’s crafted heat-death crime
and perhaps decide to drift into deeper night
in search of a watery speck where children play
and seek inspiration from a heavenly muse,
children who evolved but never lit the fuse
and make love beneath the cool of round white light.

~William Hammett

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Friday, July 17, 2026

A Bird Sings After the Rain

A redbird in love with late summer
honors its recording contract with the universe.
It sings while the sky is still gray,
while drops of rain still fall
to form temporary museum pieces,
puddles reflecting impressionistic scenes
stippled by the softest of winds
that ushered in the storm last hour.
I sit in my open garage at the end of a road
and listen to the notes seed the air with ideas
of how the bird thinks the day should proceed.
I cannot read such music or analyze the score.
I can only listen, as any patron of the arts,
to that which transcends time and space
and yet is present for me now,
sitting in the woods and hoping that my life
will contain many more songs
with hope always the trusted refrain.
I am old, but my soul does not mind
the gentle disciple of cleansing rain.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, July 8, 2026

Etaoin Shrdlu

Hot type, slug type, linotype,
you, baby, were more than filler text,
more than something to complete a line
when the newsroom wanted deadline.
You were sweet, fruit that was ripe.
There was me, there was you,
and you were anything but etaoin shrdlu.

No error was King Cnut and clan,

no proofing mistake at the end

or when the dance began,

Neither placeholder nor old headline,

it was girl meets boy, boy meets world,

for me an entirely different point of view,

never wrangled or tangled up in blue.

Looking at water, staring at the moon,

gazing at the mirror over the bar

after inhaling a favorite psychic tune,

there was always something fresh, something new.

Rope in my veins, flowers in bloom, my back pages

were so much younger than the old hag’s groom.

You were a sonnet, not etaoin shrdlu.

Nobody understood, nobody understood,

or so we said on a philosophical stool

while reminiscing rainwater that had disdained our sieve.

For the first time I knew how to live,

and because of you I was nobody’s fool.

Quantum entanglement is probably the why.

You were literature’s kiss, scansion true,

not some bibliographic etaoin shrdlu.

~Willim Hammett

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Monday, June 29, 2026

Hot Tibetan Dream Yoga

The instructor is a ribbon of light
inhaling the ether without cumbersome ego
while tying itself into Nirvana
and spinning like a gyroscope.
Long black hair below her bottom
swings like rope that prisoners yearn for,
and she is all pitch and yaw,
shoulders and hips swiveling
east and west in counterpoint rhythm,
and oh, how in the world can she do that?
And then she is upon me,
this supernova of liquid love
swallowing the planet that is me,
going under my leg and over my arm
until there is involuntary ecstasy,
convulsive spasms of hatha
om mani padme hum and then some.
And then all is still.
I see a fountain of water laughing,
and the afternoon sun is flying
through prism drops, and I am spent,
a nickel at the five and dime of love.
I wake from a lucid dream
only to find that I am falling asleep
and everything is illusion,
a series of positions and exultations,
exercises to teach us the down below
and the teacher who is breathing,
breathing life always from far above.

~William Hammett

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Friday, June 12, 2026

Summers on Montauk

Sitting in a deck chair, blue waves
topped by Florentine shimmers
scud the ocean into breeze
and a still life cliché while beautiful people
in bikinis holding beach reads
seek opiates of ennui and rum.

Beyond, far beyond the breakers,

the Atlantic rolls, heaves

twenty-foot gray waves holding up

a slate-gray sky and the chill of winter.

The Titanic strikes an iceberg

and the irony of nearer my God to thee.

In France, the Germans have taken hold,

and the Resistance burrows under soil

once used for love’s purple intoxication.

Anne Frank writes of hope in her attic

and the thousand natural shocks and joys

that flesh peering through a lens is heir to.

Flowers are thrown at GI’s, jeeps rolling

through villages of champagne and kisses

deep where liberation babies will breach

and look for Father Time’s American postmark.

It is all too much to take in, too far away

and just a dream, is it not?

Who can see the beyond the horizon

through Anne Hathaway sunglasses

and the foam of stoners playing in the surf.

A butler brings a tray of drinks

to the row of wooden chairs low to the ground.

The lifeboats cannot hold any more strays,

and didn’t the cannons cease fire

in the war to end all wars?

Good fences make good neighbors,

and the gray swells rise like stones

to keep at bay all that is not Montauk.

~William Hammett

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