Andrew Hamlin's "Haiku 55" is less a single poem than a notebook page, nineteen small scenes jotted down one after another. Eleven of them begin with the same dateline, "Tenth week of the plague," and the others drift in without it. Judging by the masks, the dog-walkers talking at a distance, and the word "plague" itself, the sequence seems to record a long period of public illness and lockdown. The poem never explains this. It shows people on buses, in barbershops and on trains, and lets the reader do the arithmetic.
The central idea is that when the world feels suspended, paying attention becomes a way of staying alive. Nothing here is an event. A man in a beard "to his belt" gets one boot onto a bus. A bottle "rolls where it will." A rapper holds a phone to his ear "for his backing track." Yet the speaker records each of these as carefully as news. The question in the middle of the sequence, "if we're all dead, who takes stock / of the curled leaves?", reads like the poem's reason for existing. Someone has to notice, and the poem volunteers.
The form is loose. These are haiku in their brevity, their seasonal touches ("Autumn of the heart," the storm, the sunburn) and their habit of ending on a sharp image. They do not follow a strict five-seven-five count, and there is no rhyme. What holds each one together is rhythm and sound. The lines are short and often break mid-thought: "one black boot halfway / onto the bus" leaves the boot hanging in the air, just as the man is caught between street and vehicle. Ellipses and dashes work like held breaths. In "Marchers gone home… / I watch steady storm spatter / take the concrete," the clustered s and t sounds imitate rain drumming on pavement. "Sparks / skitter on sidewalk" does the same for fireworks. The poem is full of this kind of onomatopoeia and alliteration, small music standing in for rhyme.
The repeated dateline is the main structural device. It works like a diary heading, but it also gives the effect of a slow drumbeat, each repetition reminding us that time is passing without changing anything. The poem plays on this by varying what follows. Sometimes the refrain leads into comedy ("the crows–so saucy these days!"), sometimes into tenderness ("a black child, black braids" emerging from a rocking orange tent), and sometimes into unease: the speaker "wait[s] to see if the mask / drops past his nostrils," a tiny, tense moment that only makes sense in a time of contagion. Even the dog "hunches and runs / like a fugitive," as though the animals have caught the mood too. The word "concrete" returns in two separate scenes, as the pavement the storm takes and as "Broadway concrete" where a book's pages turn in the wind. It gives the city a hard, solid presence beside all the fragile things on it.
The sequence opens and closes at opposite extremes. It begins with a man who "sat still his whole life" and, "at the last second," reaches "one arm / closer to the stars." That image suggests death, or a longing to escape. It ends with a child in a barbershop who "screams / like steel on marble." The simile is ugly and loud, and it is wonderfully alive. The poem moves from a gesture toward the heavens to a shriek in a very ordinary room, and it seems to prefer the shriek.
Some moments stay deliberately opaque. "He leaves Him to zip up" and "The General sleeps" are never explained, and the capitalised pronouns invite guesses without confirming any. This mix of clarity and mystery suits the subject. In a strange season, the speaker catches only fragments of other people's lives, and so do we.
The poem's significance lies in this patient, unshowy witnessing. It makes no speeches about the crisis. It trusts a dog, a bottle, a fan, a bus and a crow to carry the feeling, and by the end the reader has a sense of a whole city holding its breath, with one person quietly writing down what it looks like.