Lunchbox Poems

It was summer on the north coast,
the wrong coast, they call it in the East.
It was summer. And summer means rain.

Rain disolved the islands in the sound,
it buried mountains and turned the ocean gray.
I listened to it rattle at my window.

Funny, how you wake some days
in the middle of the morning, and know
somehow a part of the world had died.

another language lifted from our tongues,
another way of knowing. And you don’t know
whether the pulse you feel is yours

or is the fading beat of the world.
An eagle is not a symbol for a thing.
It was early summer or late spring.

I listened to the rain.
For all its tenderness and wealth,
the earth is often a meagre gift.

But to know and not speak
is the greatest grief. Listen.
The world flows away like a wave.

-Sam Hamill

(appears at Memory’s Vault, Fort Warden State Park, Port Townsend, WA)