Haiku 38 — Summary

Andrew HamlinContemplative

Thursday happy hour tabletop, sticky with beer a saint, undisturbed

Bus driver, stone-faced under a handlebar ‘stache lets the cyclist live

Power, knowing that you never get this moment to regurgitate

“I am still freezing” from Tolstoy’s summation of his Russian winter

That someone would come along but no, really you have to save yourself

Seahawks umbrella shredded in spikes by the storm then the wind steals it

The can tumbles west the wind blows it back uphill a boy’s first memory

I sprout my father’s grin his sad smile upon my face when it all goes wrong

Lone crow with acorn ignores its murder across from the pot clinic

No one notices as I brush the moth beneath the neon “OPEN”

A smaller moth darts through that left front burner coil one pot on to boil

Black bird on red ball fifty feet out in Green Lake preening for balance

To dirty our hands on this salutorious sticky universe

Bright but cold, again Steam escaping a laundry First day of autumn

Gave myself credit for the light burning upstairs but that’s mostly luck

Water from the well oscillating in its pail summer’s shortest night

I want to believe droplets slouching for the drain oblige all I ask

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Andrew Hamlin's "Haiku 38" is a string of short observations, each a quick snapshot of ordinary life: a sticky bar table, a bus driver sparing a cyclist, a crow with an acorn, a moth caught near a stove burner. Place names like Green Lake and a Seahawks umbrella suggest a Pacific Northwest setting, though that is an inference from the details.

Between these scenes, the speaker slips in more personal thoughts. Nobody is coming to rescue you, so you have to save yourself. Luck, not virtue, may be why the light is on upstairs. The speaker finds a father's sad smile on their own face when things go wrong. These lines are wry, a little weary, and quietly honest.

The mood is gentle and watchful, with humor and melancholy side by side. The poem seems to find meaning in small, easily missed things, and it accepts that life is "sticky," imperfect, and mostly beyond our control.

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