The Poetry of Kendra Hamilton

Speculative Friction

“Mystery stands with us and speaks through us as we chant and drum and hum our connection to that hidden world that stands beside and inside the one in which we pay our taxes and take out the trash. We’re taught that the fundamental responsibility of the artist is to remind us of our mortality, whether that takes the form of Homer’s warriors chanting their great deeds into everlasting fame or Thomas and Beulah weeping, laughing, and dying over three-quarters of a bewildered century. And that is poetry’s great power and its greatest gift: it allows us to live fully into our own lives and those of others, bearing witness to it all . . . while, blessedly, relieving us of the burden of our names.”—Kendra Hamilton

By Claire Bateman, Poetry Editor

GREENVILLE South Carolina—(Hubris)—March/April 2026—Over the course of her multifaceted life as a journalist, poet, essayist, and scholar, Dr. Kendra Y. Hamilton has produced, among many other publications, an essential work of Gullah Geechee scholarship, Romancing the Gullah in the Age of Porgy and Bess (University of Georgia Press, 2024) as well as a rollicking journey through a blues landscape, The Goddess of Gumbo: Poems (WordTech Publications LLC, 2006). 

Hamilton is an interdisciplinary artist who has co-created conceptual art projects for the Spoleto Festival USA; and she is also a Cave Canem Foundation fellow, whose poems and essays have appeared in Callaloo, The Southern Review, Obsidian, and anthologies including Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and Shaping Memories: Reflections of 25 African American Women Writers. 

Hamilton is an associate professor at Presbyterian College, where she teaches American and African American literature and heads the Southern Studies program. She writes: “Yes, poetry is about observation: that ‘stinkbug in the window with the red underwings’ moment, as my poet buddy Sam Witt once put it. But poetry is not just an experience; it is a language, too, of riddling and song, spell and incantation that of itself becomes a making, of the intellect and imagination as well as of the blood and bone and muck. You must take care what you speak into the poem, for you may summon an ifrit, the goddess Oshun, bearing honey and cowries, or the Archangel Michael with his fiery sword. 

“Mystery stands with us and speaks through us as we chant and drum and hum our connection to that hidden world that stands beside and inside the one in which we pay our taxes and take out the trash. We’re taught that the fundamental responsibility of the artist is to remind us of our mortality, whether that takes the form of Homer’s warriors chanting their great deeds into everlasting fame or Thomas and Beulah weeping, laughing, and dying over three-quarters of a bewildered century. And that is poetry’s great power and its greatest gift: it allows us to live fully into our own lives and those of others, bearing witness to it all . . . while, blessedly, relieving us of the burden of our names.” 

Hamilton continues: “The first three poems here are from a collection in progress inspired by the life of Belle Marion Greener, better known as Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan’s rare books expert and one of the most important librarians in American history. She was born in 1883, or perhaps 1879, the youngest of three children of Genevieve Ida Fleet and Richard Theodore Greener. Much of what is known of Belle’s parentage has been deliberately obscured, but this is sure: Belle’s father, Richard Greener was a brilliant young man, the first African American to graduate from Harvard College, who later became a lawyer and professor of law, held positions of responsibility high in the Roosevelt Administration, wrote articles on race relations published in important newspapers of the day, and eventually served as a diplomat in Russia. But at some point, for reasons we’ll never know or understand, Genevieve Greener set her heart on a different life. She separated from her husband and, styling herself as “knickerbocker heiress” Genevieve Van Vliet Greene, began living with her children in New York as a white woman.

Knickerbocker Heiress Genevieve Van Vliet Marshals Her Forces
By Kendra Hamilton 

A sweet-faced boy
bumbling into battle
—that one we call brave.
To handle a hard-mouthed horse,
run into a burning brownstone
armed with only
axe and hose,
knock with hopeless words
at the honeyed gate
of a woman’s heart
—these things, too,
are counted brave.
Mother, they don’t speak of you,
storming the doors
of a Madison Avenue tearoom
armed with only
your fan.

I think of barques as I watch you
floating amid your kind,
the women of the dulcet coos.
You are one peacock-bright
Langtry bustle among dozens
in these places,
exciting no remark.
Until the languid eyes
swivel, as they eventually
inevitably do,
to your dark
companion, every feature of mine
stamped with your mark
then back to you,
in query.
Erect in the exquisite armor
of your corsage à la cuirasse,
you collect those eyes,
pansy brown, pebble blue,
or just plain grey and dismiss them
with the lash of your black eyes, one
flick of that ivory confection
on your wrist.

But Mother, I am not
steel in silk like you.
My heart betrays our pact.
I remember with a part of me
I am not allowed to name
his face, the books

that were his care,
his dark hands with a pen
forming flowing script
on paper:

Greener,
a tendril of feeling you tell me
I must root and burn.
Greener,
a word your silence
scorches from my tongue.

Mother,
I am not a woman of lead
or one of rice paper.
My flesh is troubled by
their eyes.
But you, you step forward,
the grape and canister of your private war aboil
within your veins,
and what can I do but stand with you?

Who can I be,
who could I ever be
but my mother’s daughter?

Becoming Belle da Costa Greene
By Kendra Hamilton

In this briefest span of days
the mirror of the world
reflects a girl
I never thought to know
No, mother, I’m no
Beauty—
even better
—I’se Original
Wits proclaim my wit
Leisured ladies condescend to nod
Artists judge my too-brown cheeks
fine-chiseled
and so on and on
And the shadows at
my skirts
—whispers of Malay! no
oh no
Portugee!
Huh, darky don’t you mean!—
they stay in shadow
whitened in the sun
of my Big Chief’s regard
his spring
time eyes
and I unfold a tendril greener
than the earliest leaf
of the nakedest tree
for this is more I have ever known
more than si mi chiamamo
and a moonlit garrett on my birthday
stronger liquor even than my father’s shaving brushes
sweet liberty
served up on a plate of solid gold
and what have I to do to win you?
only play the game
fast? loose?
not be Caesar’s puling wife,
nor his daughters turbulent?
compliant?
not even be his mistress
but instead the expert witness
glass reflecting what he loves
what he can buy
and mirror of my world
he guards my secret
as we know and
smile at
laugh
at how they wonder
all

Belle’s Nights of Dreamless Sleep
By Kendra Hamilton 

Because my mother said I cried out
in my sleep
because I’d not been wrestling angels
though waking each day, lids of brick
cramped clenched from grasping?
fending off?
because I can’t or won’t recall my dreams
and this provokes her 

I spin words in the new sweet style
for her entertainment.
Say I dreamed a Tuscan wood:
a white hind with an emerald collar
moon-bright grasses gemmed with dew
and the curve of a luminous neck
grazing. 

Oh, you are Caesar’s,
are you not? And wild for to hold?
And has he hung a sign around your neck:
“Noli me tangere?” Indeed! 

Her laughter has a bite:

So I revise:
For me the night is but a chilled chamber
a fire in the grate guttered low
a sleep that leads in one direction:
deeper into dark.
I do not speak of the road I half recall
an unspooled ribbon under the moon
which I wander
always
alone.

Obsidian eyes grimly
observant
she pours a cup of chicoried coffee.

I think—no, I don’t think, I know.
You need to marry.

Author’s Note: “The poems below comprise a crown of sonnets which conclude the first section of The Goddess of Gumbo. In them, Naxos functions as a double allusion, to both the opera Ariadne auf Naxos and to Naxos, Alabama, which is the setting of Quicksand, by Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen.”

Ariadne Auf Naxos, Alabama
By Kendra Hamilton

I. On Seeing Dionysus at the Hydraulic Road K-mart

Iakhos, holy one, lightly treads linoleum aisles past
lawn mowers, half-price books, Martha’s pastel towels.
A cart, leopard-drawn, draped in grapevine, trundles
at his heels. Square-hipped shop girls sigh and sweat.

They hear the maenads singing—though there are those
who see only someone’s dad, taller than many, better looking
than most—a deacon in somebody’s church? Proof,
I say, our world’s not odd enough for outlandish you.

Or contrarily that, of this parking lot world smelling so
strongly of diesel fumes, you are the savior. Marooned here
among the adenoidal girl singers and jumbo tubs of peanut
butter, I could be your Ariadne, lost and longing to be found.

It is spring, your feast-time. Leaves are on the vines. We broach
new wine to pour libations, and we grow young . . .  we grow young.

II. The Triple Goddess Learns the Electric Slide

We broach new wine to pour libations. We grow young,
each year younger. Yes, the crown grays, breasts sink
lower on our bellies. Still we don our dancing shoes,
our flashing rings, set bits of crystal clashing in our ears.

Still we curl our lashes, straighten our hair so as, aswirl
in scent, in silks, to dance again our spiral dance, stepping
forward, swaying back, all those rows of toes tip-tapping
an electric slide, in perfect time, into timelessness.

So, yes, it’s just the Elks Lodge, as you say, just a group
no longer young in heels, a silly line dance, four-four beat.
Yet each is more: crone who in her prime grows young,
skin fresh, elastic, on her tongue no foretaste of the lees

at the bottom of the cup. Spirit, birdlike, darts amongst us:
we wax, we wane, stars rise, the earth exhales a dark perfume.

III. Ariadne auf Naxos, Alabama

I wax. I wane. The earth exhales her dark perfume
on this night blacker than emigration, than the darkest
night of separation, when even the stars above are red
and sullen. A thing I know. We’re falling out of love.

It’s said the sweets of life are for the mad. Well, I’ve
been that for you. Left my home blood-hot, candent
for the flush of skin on skin. Now I subsist on glimpses,
your distant voice acrackle on a mobile phone.

You found the thread hid deep within the labyrinth
of me, followed without effort. Your kiss my resurrection,
I came blinking from that world below. A thing I know—
for me there’s no return to the numbness of before . . .

So I think now, never was death so alive as on that day
you came, breathing miracles which now you murder.

IV. Ariadne’s Plaint Continues

You came, breathing miracles which now you murder
not respecting even spring—the finches chip-chip-
chipping at the feeder, tulips carving dabs of blood
on the picket fence, freedom not a hate or a forgetting

not yet at least. And still I cannot rest, have bad dreams:
a woman came with hands and eyes like mine, hair like night
perfumed with musk, and she’d been weeping, weeping.
I know her thready whisper how I died as my heart

greyly failed within me. And still you call and still I come,
as if forever’s now were where we stood, were still
to give. I’ve accepted what you can’t—there’s no appeal
from reason. So soon and very soon I’ll have to save myself,

leave this house to mourn its builder, find another,
breathe the no that fate won’t let me yes. This time.

V. Theseus Recalls His Days Under Sail

Breathe the no that fear won’t let her yes? This time
she may. What holds her here I know—thirty years of history:
tiny hands on faces in a playpen, or dumped into a common bath.
Her smell, the very texture of her skin, like innocence itself.

Dark of heart, they’d say who knew us well, for me to claim
her love, her trust, all the luminous whole of singing her—
for cease from exploration, I cannot; shake off
my commitments, I will not, not even for the secret sweet

of her. It’s at the heart of who I am. I love the calls at 3 a.m.
Montreal? I’m there. I leave a house that sleeps to board
a jet bound who knows where. Just like the haze gray
days of setting out, sailing where the skies and sea are blue

and the women slim, hot, next to nothing on. Still I hold.
Our brief days grow briefest, she says. I don’t let go.

VI. Dionysus Speaks in Dreams and Portents

Their brief days already briefest, I just eased
the letting go. For heart-starved, sucked frail by spring’s
unregenerate bright sun she began to pine, to fail.
In his greediest paws I saw her going down, down,

down to dolor while his pride peacocked fat, well-fed
on her red currant pout. This my mystery profaned
for I am the merging/the madness both gentle
and terrible… which she does not flee. One whisper

from me leaves him sleepless, cigarette in hand, while
in a room across the river she sprawls in sweet
apostasy, grapevine twined about her bed. The skirl
of flutes, scent of wine arising, her heart opens

like hibiscus to my words. The thread is not lost:
if I be your labyrinth, you’ll find it in the dark.

VII. Shopping for the Sacred Marriage

She would find them in the dark, but the labyrinth
is garish with fluorescent light, the six hundred
thread count sheets she seeks sold out—nor do the cheap
chenilles, crochets offered in their stead have power to tempt.

She trips away. No more the nibbling sharp-toothed hours.
And that last thread of his voice raveling from the raw edge
of this current ease? She snips it, ruthlessly, away.
The absolute stars are still overhead, spring breeding

glory of the snow and crocus below, and she knows
the one note to resolve her discordant passions
into perfect silken tune won’t sound. Love him or end
it, neither stops the rhythm of the dance, the skirl

of flutes, the fragrant scent of libation. Even here, in this place,
Iakhos treads the cold white aisles, palm outstretched for her.