RESTORING THE MEMORY’S VAULT STELEA
    Sam Hamill’s Words on Steel, Fort Worden

  by Peggy de Broux

- Peggy de Broux

RESTORING THE MEMORY’S VAULT STELEA
    Sam Hamill’s Words on Steel, Fort Worden

Sam’s poems, long ago, were
etched in soft, glowing copper, later
battered by baseball bats
or something harder.

The defaced words found
a harder surface:  steel,
this time fitted
to concrete stelae.

The loving in his words
still shines on the new
metal plaques—

his strong point of view
still burns,
beacon to non-violence.

Graffiti defaces the Memory’s Vault
gate, concrete chairs and, worse,
the shrine housing
a rugged rock, despoiled

by hands who left prints
like cats spraying territory.
Nothing changes the poems, though,
except the way different folk read them.

The poem “Cloistered” has, for me,
 a melting last stanza:  
“But to know and not to speak
is the greatest grief.  Listen.
The world flows away like a wave
 . . . somehow a part of the world has died.”

And he touches our consciousness
about how so many men died
in the “Great War” and in WWII.
The stelae thrust up, like grave markers,

though they are taller, even taller
than the Great Blue which graces
some lines, even as we’re reminded
that there was never a shot fired

from Fort Worden, though the guns
watched, just like a heron for its dinner,
but never needed.  The emplacements
remain; Sam’s stelae remain,

making “the Memory’s Vault”
a sacred place, a quiet half-way
up the hill, “high up in the evergreens.”

My favorites, those lines singing
rainsong for us, a typical Northwest rain:
“. . .big drops / plunketing through the leaves.”