Fifteen tiny scenes, and not one of them stops to explain itself. "Haiku 47" reads less like a single poem than a pocketful of snapshots, each cut off almost as soon as it appears. A broken wheel, a porter, a men's room, a dead lamp, a politician, a spider: the subjects have nothing in common except that someone's eyes happened to land on them. The number in the title suggests a longer run of such pieces, though that is an inference from the title alone.
The form is loose. Each stanza has a short first line, a longer middle and a short close, which echoes the 5-7-5 shape of traditional haiku without obeying it. "A wheel, broken" has only four syllables. There is no rhyme, so the stanzas are held together by their rhythm and by what each leaves out. Dashes and an ellipsis create the pauses. Haiku traditionally ground themselves in a season, and Hamlin keeps the habit with "spring rain," an "afternoon squall" and a "half-moon night." But he sets that weather beside sirens, church-band cymbals and city buses, so nature happens in the middle of ordinary urban noise.
Across the fifteen stanzas, the poem keeps returning to things that are damaged, overlooked or on their way out. The opening image sets the pattern: a wheel "broken / but not so you would notice" still dazzles travelers, so appearance and condition have quietly come apart. After that come the "dead lamp," the doctors "long gone," a tree waiting for the axe, and a dead movie star's life story "tossed on the lawn / to rot with spring rain." The irony there is neat. Rain is the season's sign of renewal, but here it only soaks a vanished celebrity's paper life.
The poem is also funny, in a dry way. "Those muddy clothes / thrown off by the universe" sounds momentarily grand, then collapses into a chore: "who'll stack the laundry?" The quoted "Cosmic Energy," with its call to "stay sensible," punctures large claims in the same way. The politician who "says it isn't either/or" is set against a speaker hiding from the storm, so smooth public talk about nuance meets a plain need for shelter. The poem seems to trust small physical facts over big statements.
Its senses are sharp, especially hearing and touch. The siren "mixed with the church band's cymbal" blends alarm and celebration into one flat "Friday afternoon." The sidewalk's "wet crunch" is described as if it "broke half a molar," which turns pavement into a mouth and makes the reader wince. Some images work the other way, toward stillness and smallness. The shot glasses left on the picnic bench fill by accident with rain, and a spider "too small for the eye" rests "in silver" under the moon. The porter's "twin spirals" for eyes could mean hypnotized, exhausted or dazzled, and the poem leaves that open, just as "open-handed and still" could mean patience or surrender.
What ties the sequence together is the speaker's position. Again and again the speaker is a bystander who sees only part of the picture. The wheel's flaw is hidden from the travelers, and the spider is too small to see. Two old lovers pass on buses, and the speaker asks, "But what would I say?" Then comes the last stanza: a weak voice under a blanket says, "I'm okay, all right," and the speaker adds, "I don't see his face." Whether the reassurance is true, we can't tell, and the speaker doesn't check.
That ending is why the piece lingers. In a few words it admits that attention has limits, and that noticing someone is not the same as reaching them. The poem's compression lets comedy and unease sit side by side, and the reader is left to finish each scene, which is the one thing the speaker cannot do.