The Poetry of William Hammett

Wednesday, November 5, 2025

Wild Blossoms

I picked flowers for you today
in the countryside in the green field
with wild blossoms of every size
and the color of Solomon’s regalia.

I put them in water

from the pure, clear stream

that still runs through my heart

and, I hope, yours as well.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Links in the Merlin Double Helix Chain

The Flying Bellinis, hand to wrist
above the big tent sawdust,
know the continuum of daredevil “ahhh!”
from night to night, from father to son.
The daisy chain’s endless green and white
tied together with matrimonial bands
stop and start, dip and chart
the Billboard hippie fest—can you dig the light,
man and wife spawning the generational heart?
Watch Whitman stitch the leaves of grass,
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry before the lilacs bloom
in the dooryard when Lincoln heaves the torch.
Most of all, Joyce riverrun past Eve and Adam's,
and the first shall be last and the last
shall be first—oh I’m talking syntax and pages
that loop like gyres, and to every season,
there is pern, pern, pern, Seeger and Yeats
says Qoheleth: live, die, plant, reap,
laugh, weep, and dance under Scottish Skye
to the music of the spheres still spinning
despite Galileo’s culling of cepheid stars.
Uther Pendragon begets, and the once and future
marries Guinevere again and again and again,
while Lancelot, the queen’s joyous guard,
finds a way to split the round, pierce her mound
every time. Place your bets on the neon ground.
Which brings us to Merlin, the master hook and wheel
who pivots and joins the constellations nine
with magic born of Barnum and Igraine.
To every sex and seed there is a reason,
a time and purpose under heaven for lay, laid, and lain.
It’s coffeehouse beat, a Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg howl.
I am, you are, he she it is the Walrus
disguised by the mystery tour’s Franciscan cowl.
Be off now. Get with child a mandrake root.
All the stones are one. All the stones are one.
Let us start when everything’s begun.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, October 22, 2025

The Spitting Image of Joan Baez

She was the spitting image of Joan Baez,
and I knew her and I loved her.
The sound of the redbird was sweeter,
the sky was bluer, and water
and my thoughts were as clear
as the music in which we lived.
And oh, the grass was dark green
and a bed upon which we lay our thoughts
beneath three-masted sailing clouds
or the quiet gaze of the moon.
It made all the difference,
like a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain.
Do you know what I mean?
Can you possibly understand
what I mean?

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, October 15, 2025

Two Ways to Dance

Let them sing and chant,
the ones hooded in widow’s black,
of serendipity and pain,
of blood and wood
and a world of perpetual rain.
Incense from the virgins
clouds the nave and the swinging brain.
Let them dance a jig on angel wings
from Eden to the harlot and the beast,
to the catastrophic end of things.

I shall not moan for the Sky Father

but will search for the coquette

at the outdoor Parisian café.

The City of Lights is a moon,

and I shall dance a jig that sings

for Monique or Marie or whomever

she may turn out to be.

I shall drink an aperitif

to the juice running from the pulp of life

and the beginning of all living things.

~William Hammett

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Monday, October 6, 2025

Tidal Surge

The waves wash over welcome sand,
the Oversoul such a wide and ponderous thing.
There is freedom on the land
for legs and claws, feathers and wings
and a simple life of quotidian things
and me.

The tide rolls out to the deep

and carries away the steps on the path,

the settling of accounts by cabin’s light.

It is a relief to once again roll into the sea,

the home where there is only a present tense

of to be.

~William Hammett

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Friday, September 26, 2025

The Ark

There are two of every kind,
though the battle lines are a bit blurred these days.
Who measured these awful cubits of would?
The boat is tilted, crowded and heaving
as if it had no axis, no sun to worship
on days when Proteus sweeps the oceans
into a shroud because Frost could make no peace
between fire and the weeping polar ice.
The incense from the forge and factory
does not appease the carpenter or his boss,
who thought the trip on a heavenly whirligig
might last a hundred billion apocalyptic spins
after Adam knocked up fruit-filled Eve.
We drift through space, a milkweed spore
on an ark, nothing less and nothing more.
The wheel and a spark of electric flint
have become the nuclear flu, a covid strain
with binary digits running God’s motherboard.
Let there be bread for the wandering wastrel horde
riding the nonstop snow-piercing equatorial train.
Let there be a dove with an olive branch,
a night when only dolphins and crickets sing.
Let there be a hundred million miracles
on this troubled, ancient, spinning thing.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, September 18, 2025

Poor Man's Yoga

In the park in the fall,
I hold my arms outstretched
as if I had just awakened from sleep,
though that happened many years ago.
I try to touch my toes several times,
always breathing, always breathing,
but I can’t reach too far beneath my knees.
It’s almost time to go home, I think,
or maybe not quite yet.
I turn my head to the left, breathing,
and see a robin sitting on a branch
that has lost all but three browning notes
that once waved a symphony.
I turn my head to the right, breathing,
and see a young mother and her child.
He is laughing at me, a wrinkled thing,
and I begin laughing too.
I have become the cliché,
the old man in the heavy overcoat
on a bright chilly afternoon
sitting on a park bench.
“Hello, little boy. Namaste.”
I stand and sit three times in a row,
always breathing, always breathing.
It is October indeed
and almost time to go home.
Shadows reclining on the grass
will soon stir and whisper and rise,
tall and dark and definitive,
and start walking down the concrete path.
It is October indeed.
It is almost time to go home.

~William Hammett

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Friday, September 12, 2025

The Vatican Blues

I attended an audience with the Lord,
a small white robe and zucchetto
floating on the balcony like a dove.
He looked at the sea of nuns and veils
heaving like waves from a Galilee wind,
sun painting the colonnade the color of clouds.
Latin syllables flew through Saint Peter’s Square
like pigeons, landing on Babel’s obelisk and cross.
“What we need is a song,” said a priest from Budapest.
Snake played the bass, the tall giraffe on the ‘bone
while a beast with whiskers lightly scared the snare.
Black girls in silver sequins snapped and swayed,
background singers chanting “ooh poo pah doo.”
The ship lumbered through the Med,
but the albino could not calm the storm,
did not walk on water, did not cross the sea
of eyes looking to the balcony of be.
The whore of Babylon lit a cigarette,
then crushed it with a stiletto heel.
The seven hills of Rome were done,
leveled by an acid dream of horns and eyes
and a dragon dressed to the nines in fire.
The multitude nodded off and fell asleep by one.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, September 3, 2025

The Play Within the Play

I am writing a play, and the ink is wine
or the wine is ink—I don’t know which.
Iago will not stop babbling his convoluted plot
to make me jealous and kill the bitch,
but which one? I have made so many.
I only wish to kiss the lips of Juliet,
a palmer and a pilgrim who will get her yet.
What are these screams from a Globe on a globe
crying for a gaggle of hag, a trio of witch?
I have papers to grade in this oak-paneled cove
at the edge of the ivy-colored quad,
the wild yet carefully-planted Forest of Arden
while the Avon carries the street, the ford, the garden.
Spritely Ariel spins my mind like the moon:
the play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch
the conscience of the wrongful king
while Prospero, magician extraordinaire,
conjures up a storm so that Miranda,
a lipstick looker and first-class babe,
might marry her flamenco jape and jade.
Between you and me, I spin it all out of air.
Call me Will. I am the bard and he is me.
The essays are done and the claret is near.
I do the iambic nine-to-five and lecture on the lines,
but who’s to say I’m not the seer
in the long ago or the still to come in time?

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Morning Tide

The sun is new.
White breakers roll
onto sand with foam and roar.
A crimson and orange sky
rises into blue,
the curtain up
and lines recited by surf
and gulls riding
updrafts of sea wind
and swells of current
over the deep mind
of a waking world.

It is the dawn

of new and everlasting

time spun from nothing

but the vacuum and void,

an idea with an idea

of form and substance.

From east to west,

light sweeps the land

into cities and prairies

and uneven mountains

that insist on rock-rise.

From water, it all begins again.

~William Hammett

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Thursday, August 21, 2025

Finding Mary Magdalene

I saw her in the weave of time,
a shimmer in a silver stream,
scoping out couture and purple Prada
while wearing the seven veils of Salome,

eyeliner drawn into fine Egyptian points.

We had dinner and water made from wine

beneath the Brooklyn Bridge

before heading to a lover’s loft

where the Soho demons howled

until she released them with a midnight sigh.

The magician was nowhere to be seen,

just a woman with her bangles and beads.

We walked to the Village and past the Tombs

hand in hand, the femme younger than the script

would have the generations believe,

a May-December flip of the hair and heart.

Oh, she was the pearl of great price,

the treasure hidden in a field.

Time passed, and New Hampshire roped us in

as we settled on a plausible tale to spin

on scrolls where ink specified iota and jot.

We made too much love and not enough,

her red lips, dark hair, blue eyes

never growing old like a dead sea

with salt and dying fish that were multiplied.

Her love was a shimmer in a silver stream,

twisting and rising and turning

and always always to die for.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, August 12, 2025

The Crossing

The harried housewife stops for the train—
the gate swing and bell ring—
a silver snake speeding into burbs.
She crosses the hump of rails
to find a home, to cook a meal,
a yellow firefly blinking into sleep.

The comet speeds through dark matter cold—

a tail of dust, a hint of home—

iron-nickel ice crossing the belt

to warm itself, to speak with Brother Saul.

The whip-swing sling shot

sends it to the burbs where sleeping dogs lie.

~William Hammett

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Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Rare Books

They are old soldiers home from the war,
spines cracked and broken,
aching from the weight of life
and stories that beg to be told.
The pages are yellow, like the teeth

of men who have seen a century crawl

on its knees from birth to fragility.

Memories are stored along the bones,

thread stitching together the decades.

Dog ears measure first love, innocent kisses,

the time by the stream in the woods

when clothes were shed with abandon

and the opposite sex was a game

of flirtation and near misses.

Some rose early in the blue morning

for a factory with a stack,

an office with a clock

with only a nine and five on its face.

There’s a bookmarker here and there

whispering “I simply can’t go on right now,

but maybe later, maybe later.”

Dust on the covers and the tops of the pages

seems to anticipate death,

and yet they live on, their minds intact

and ready to quote a poem or tale

of this day or that,

of how cleansing the rain was

or how the land was sunny and flat.

They have been consigned to retirement,

yearning like Ulysses for years—more years—

and yet these old men with vellum souls,

their thoughts as precise as ink,

seem to ponder, word by word

and line by line, the real possibility

that they are destined for immortality.

~William Hammett

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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

And Dylan Went Electric

The old Chines man named Po
sat on the mountain and disappeared,
his meditations swept away by the wind.
The mountain, too, dissolved over time.

The river cannot remain a river

as long as it finds a home in the sea,

and oceans cannot remain water

as long as the clouds read the waves like Braille.

You and I will not inhabit skin and bones

when clocks are frozen at the end of time.

The earth prays for dust and dirt

that it may remain a celestial compost heap.

The lighthouse drops below the horizon

as the freighter lumbers out to sea.

The Book of Changes is made of yarrow sticks

that fall like scarecrows too tired to scare the sky.

Do you understand these lines

unraveling like a tapestry with threads

pulled by a peasant tired of its design?

Even this poem must die.

~William Hammett

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