Nineteen small scenes, none longer than three lines, add up to something like a day on public transport. Andrew Hamlin's «Haiku 31» is less a single poem than a handful of snapshots: a driver's shaking hand, a mother panting after her children, a teddy bear slumped by a florist's door. Judging by the imagery, the world here is one of buses, laundry rooms and summer heat, and the speaker moves through it as an observer who is half amused and half humbled by what he sees.
The form is stricter than the casual tone suggests. Nearly every haiku keeps the 5-7-5 count: "Dying alone? Well, / what is it but dying, plain, / plus a codicil?" There is no rhyme, but the discipline gives the voice its snap. The opening poem shows how it works. Death is shrunk to a legal footnote, since a codicil is an addition to a will, and the joke lands on the last five syllables. This is closer to senryu, the haiku's human-centred cousin, than to nature poetry. People's vanity and awkwardness matter more here than cherry blossoms. The heat does recur ("After weeks of heat," "heat-drooped yellowhorn," "summer wind"), but it works as atmosphere rather than as ritual seasonal reference.
Hamlin's best effects come from mismatched registers. Bedbugs spread through "our laundry room grime," and then the poem asks, in mock-biblical grammar, "whom shall they favor?" The pests become a tiny election or a visitation of grace. Elsewhere "transmogrifies," a grand, almost cartoonish word, is applied to a man's close-lipped laughter, which turns into "an owl's twilight coo." The word is showy, but the image it delivers is gentle and exact. The poem also pays attention to sound. The bus lift "beeps its staggered triplets," a phrase that mimics the rhythm it describes, and a singer's "voice punches air" with two hard plosives. The fly's haiku comes closest to rhyme ("The fly, don't know why"), as if the speaker's offhand shrug had slipped into verse.
Beneath the comedy runs a quieter thread about leaving. The second haiku has the speaker told to "leave," and the eleventh ends "ready to leave now." Sister Fatima "says goodbye one last time" with "Wa-Alaikum-Salaam," the phrase that answers a greeting of peace, so even a parting arrives as a blessing. Placed after the opening joke about dying alone, these departures gather weight. "Take a short moment / and two or three more add up / to a longer crime" may be the sharpest lines in the sequence. Time passes in tiny pieces that seem harmless, yet the total is a sentence, and the legal-sounding word "crime" echoes the opening codicil. The speaker is also unflattering about himself. He is "the only witness / to one good deed done," which makes his own virtue faintly ridiculous, and in his "Bud Light" shirt he is "in no shape to question / the two bus boozers." He does not set himself above the people he watches.
The sequence ends on its quietest note: "Ball rolls to a stop / beside heat-drooped yellowhorn… / nothing else happens." The line works as a joke about the genre, since a haiku is expected to deliver an epiphany, and as a quiet credo. A ball stops, a flower droops, and the poem makes no claim that either means more than it does. The missing full stop and the trailing ellipses keep the moment open.
That is where the sequence earns its significance. It treats attention itself as a moral act. A fly's wandering, a toy bear's nap and an old man's tremor are not offered as symbols, only as things worth seeing, and the poem does not pretend to explain them ("A search for purpose?" is left as a question). For a reader, the effect is that ordinary mornings on the bus start to look like material, and the compassion lies in noticing them at all.