Sam Hamill: Remembering Kenneth Rexroth
The maple leaves are always green up here, and the waters of the Sound always blue. I have been thinking of you all day, at least since breezes pushed the … Continue reading
Ian Boyden: Study The Axe Handle
學柯 for Sam Hamill To study the axe handle is to study the forest, how trees stand, and how trees fall, and how to cause their falling, and what it … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: Of Cascadia (text and video)
I came here nearly forty years ago,
broke and half broken, having chosen
the mud, the dirt road, alder pollen and
a hundred avenues of gray across the sky
to be my teachers and my muses.
Sam Hamill — To the Tune: Spring at Wu Ling
The breeze has passed, pollen dust settled, and now the evening comes as I comb out my hair. There is the book, the inkstone, the table. But he who was … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: Remembering Gwendolyn Brooks
When I was a boy on a Utah farm,
I listened to Chicago blues and dreamed
of the city’s big shoulders and wide arms
and the roads leading up from the Delta
Sam Hamill: Coming to It
A midnight cup of sake, a strange solitude. Is this all I’ve become? Old and alone, bending over a poem written in loneliness by some old Chinese bag o’ bones … Continue reading
Sam Hamill — To the Tune: Boat of Stars
Spring after spring, I sat before my mirror. Now I tire of braiding plum buds in my hair. I’ve gone another year without you, shuddering with each letter— … Continue reading
Sam Hamill — To the Tune: Plum Blossoms
The fragrance of red lotuses has faded. Autumn settles at my door. I loosen my robe and drift in an orchid boat. Someone sent me love notes in the … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: Poetry, Politics, and Zen
If only we could touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we would know. — … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: Approaching Winter Solstice
A bitter wind out of the north, gulls frozen to their icy perches, and a lone tug inching its way across the bay. On the eastern horizon, the great mountain … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: Three Haiku by Issa
In the midst of this world we stroll along the roof of hell gawking at flowers — O autumn winds, tell me where I’m bound, to which particular hell … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: What the Water Knows
What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive. A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world. Still, the heart is a river … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: A Noble Truth
Falling in love is a failing. From samudaya comes dukkha, our perpetual suffering, consequence of our own desire. And who is it that does not long for love, … Continue reading
Sam Hamill: True Peace
Half broken on that smoky night, hunched over sake in a serviceman’s dive somewhere in Naha, Okinawa, nearly fifty years ago, I read of the Saigon Buddhist monks who stopped … Continue reading
