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Wonder of Hummingbirds

Text of Poem

Glass cells of red syrup hang
from the eaves, glisten in sunlight,
colored needles trail threads of flight,
spin a web where my eyes struggle
helplessly. I am enthralled by this
moment to share my pulse with wingbeat,
the gray bench teeters under my shifting,
threads of color startle my eyes as if
a cloud of geranium petals drifted down
to excite the air.

I shall sit on a bench outside this morning
and watch the hummingbirds color the air
from feeder to feeder where red syrup glistens,
they weave in their flight an invisible snare
where I fall the victim by my own volition,
amazed to be part of a moment which binds
us together, they spin their threads of flight,
I am bound in such wonder a man seldom finds.

It fascinates me to share
the morning landscape with hummingbirds,
those arrow-gifted flights of color,
to think we spilled from the same pool
where life began in a greenscum
lit by sunlight. I sit in the shade
of an aspen while they thread the
branches and snap their wings at me
(as if this chance meeting did not
meet with their approval). I sit in
wonder how it feels to be shaped so,
while they seek flowers with bells
oozing honey, they stand off each other
in mid-air, fiercely as eagles.
Their rapid wingbeat finds no
comparison to my slow pulse but here
we are together, each a part of the
day’s handful of space and neither of us
matched to the slow breath of the mountain
which grew from the same darkness into light.

First Line
Glass cells of red syrup hang
Original Pub Location
Original Publication Date
1976
Original Citation
Shaken by Leaf-Fall. Ann Arbor, MI: Kylix Press. 1976. 68.
Complete Poems
313, 396
Hearst Collections
Word Count
267, 68
Variant

1976 version (Shaken) has four verses. 1979 variant in Landmark only includes the second and third verses. Both are in Complete but with the title standardized to "Hummingbirds" instead of "Humming Birds."

Wonder of Hummingbirds (1979)

I shall sit on a bench outside this morning
and watch the hummingbirds color the air
from feeder to feeder where red syrup glistens,
they weave in their flight an invisible snare

where I fall the victim by my own volition,
amazed to be part of a moment which binds
us together, they spin their threads of flight,
I am bound in such wonder a man seldom finds.

Poetic Form
closed
Themes
Twitter Quote
here / we are together, each a part of the / day’s handful of space