Sam Hamill Poems

When they found his body
in the trash pile
near Pachachaca Bridge
in Abancay,
...

It's been nearly forty years
since you wrote that poem
about writing poems against
all those wars, Harlan County
...

I have not been to Jerusalem,
but Shirley talks about the bombs.
I have no god, but have seen the children praying
for it to stop. They pray to different gods.
...

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.
...

The little olive-skinned girl
peered up at me
from the photograph

with her eyes wide open,
...

Half broken on that smoky night,
hunched over sake in a serviceman's dive
somewhere in Naha, Okinawa,
nearly fifty years ago,
...

I sit in the dark, not brooding
exactly, not waiting for the dawn
that is just beginning, at six-twenty-one,
in gray October light behind the trees.
...

No one is the homeland. The myths of history
cannot clothe the Emperor's nakedness,
no speech empower a vote not counted,
nor honor the living who are impoverished
...