Make sure to check out his latest collection Habitation by Lost Horse Press release party at Elliott Bay Bookstore September 2
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
pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.
It opens on a bay
and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
of the unutterably human.
A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
upstream until he disappears
into the nothing from which he came.
Only the thought remains. Lacking the eagle’s cunning
or the wisdom of the sparrow, where shall I turn,
drowning in sorrow? Who will know what the trees know,
the spidery patience of young maple or what the willow confess?
Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
Listen to what the water says.
Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.
Sam Hamill
Border Song
For Esteban Moore
Sometimes I like to read
the poets of the borderlands,
slowly from their native tongue,
my scant Spanish failing at each turn,
the gists and piths of poetry.
There are images, there are tones,
that crosses the rivers
of time and space and cultural bounds
to touch the heart of one
who struggles in the journey.
Poetry is made of flesh and bone.
What is a nation, what is our song,
and what is a man, a woman, but
a tear and a smile, un abrazo fuerte
por favor, tender and temporal,
wine in the cup, a song in the ear,
when the struggle itself is everything.
It is what we know and what
we have to work with―bare hands,
dreams that restore
dreams that restore
big hungry hearts and minds
made whole by what we share:
mi pan, mi agua, mi canto amor.
Sam Hamill
WRITE YOUR POEM!
The prophets have their secrets
And their certain magic.
I am not a prophet.
I know only the ordinary.
That is my Tao.
Sam mentions in various interviews that poetry by its nature cannot claim to be apolitical. If you are a seeker of the Tao, then where does that put your poetry? The recent events in Ferguson, MO really beg a deep painful silence alongside the protests. Consider Deng Ming-Dao's comments. "In the case of a personal attack, the follower of the Tao would ask if so could they have prevented it? Of course, they would defend themselves, but even then, their self-defense would come from long solitary training and not from frantic outer directed violence." (365 Tao: Daily Meditation San Francisco, CA: Harper)
So read the Tao above. Read Harlem below. Center yourself in the tension. Write a poem that reflects a mirror. If it still beats the heart of others, then write a new poem. When you write the mirror poem put one copy on a leaf before they fall. Float it down the river. Write your poem. It is the lack of a mirror that grieves the souls of our children and elders.
Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
