Innisfree by William Hammett

And I will have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

from The Lake Isle of Innisfree by William Butler Yeats

On certain evenings,
when the galaxy’s dust falls into blue by degrees,
I think of Innisfree . . .

Here, the avenue is diseased,
commerce tainted with harlotry.
Apocalyptic rhythms race for capital gains
under the bellicose grin of the gun.
Commuters die on the subway twice a day.
Greenwich meridian is no longer in its prime:
time itself is paralyzed
and gives no refuge to the dove
or the shadow of its wing.

Having reached my quota,
I cancel all appointments for the afternoon.
Stars fall into the purple noon by degrees.
There’s a glimmer of hope in the isle,
a conspicuous absence of everything
which speaks of quantity.
Gravity acquiesces to the linnet’s wings.
Let us arise, therefore, and go to Innisfree;
let us not speak when the cricket sings
of peace which comes dropping slow
forever in the bee-loud glade.
Dust is settling from the Milky Way,
and by degrees the meridian
is slowly healed at Innisfree.


William Hammett, Louisiana, USA

African Dream by William Hammett

There is rain on the mountain
rising like an apocalypse.

The sun’s last hour is blue,
the color of wetness, the color of trees.

The herd grazes on a rainbow,
silent in the curves of geometry.

Some forgotten hymn hides in the tall grass,
fireflies praising the electric savannah

rolling into sunset.
Crickets always know the secret first.

Angels in the acacia scatter—
principalities begin their work at night.

The farmer, the oxen, the yoke—
they will carry the sun while the hours sleep.

Stars rise, only to fall on water
under the mountain.

There is a path that wanders from nowhere,
leads nowhere.

At night, the mountain lies with the earth.
Life is once again conceived

in the mind of God
from a lowly African dream.



William Hammett, Louisiana, USA

An Abundance of Tides by William Hammett

Sailors know too well
the running of marrow in their bones,
slate-gray dreams heaving them at angles
to the horizon—jagged, rolling—
as they ride meridians and sloping sorrows
to a compass point south of Capricorn.

They know of their blood’s own salt
and the odd rhythms that swell the heart,
tempting it with fathoms,
the same heart once married to soil
and content to split wood on the far side
of some forsaken country lane.


We have all crawled from the deep,
have all spawned amniotic dreams
of that time before minerals became as hard
as a life curved into gravity.
Such an awful legacy—to lumber forth on fins
while ancestors jackknife in foam.

We are all proverbial and pre-ordained,
seasick sailors who nevertheless ship our souls
to the deep where rolls our home
in measured strains from the moon:
“return, ye children of the single cell—
return.”

And like Ishmael,
we pause before the coffin warehouses
and spy funerals with a love too dear.
We take to our ships, cast off the lines,
knowing there is an abundance of tides
to help us circumnavigate
the drizzly November of the soul.



William Hammett, Louisiana, USA