Ode to the Hummingbird

Pablo Neruda

find our more about Pablo Neruda here at the Poetry Foundation

The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drip
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming resume,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!

Oh
tiny
living
lightning,
when
you hover
in the air,
you are
a body of pollen,
a feather
or hot coal,
I ask you:
What is your substance?
Perhaps during the blind age
of the Deluge,
within fertility’s
mud,
when the rose
crystallized
in an anthracite fist,
and metals matriculated
each one in
a secret gallery
perhaps then
from a wounded reptile
some fragment rolled,
a golden atom,
the last cosmic scale,
a drop of terrestrial fire
took flight,
suspending your splendor,
your iridescent,
swift sapphire.

You doze
on a nut,
fit into a diminutive blossom;
you are an arrow,
a pattern,
a coat-of-arms,
honey’s vibrato, pollen’s ray;
you are so stouthearted–
the falcon
with his black plumage
does not daunt you:
you pirouette,
a light within the light,
air within the air.
Wrapped in your wings,
you penetrate the sheath
of a quivering flower,
not fearing
that her nuptial honey
may take off your head!

From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of our girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering
from torrid California
to Patagonia’s whistling,
bitter wind.
You are a sun-seed,
plumed
fire,
a miniature
flag
in flight,
a petal of silenced nations,
a syllable
of buried blood,
a feather
of an ancient heart,
submerged

The Humming Bird

Emily Dickinson

find out more about Emily Dickinson here at the Poetry Foundation

A route of evanescence
With a revolving wheel;
A resonance of emerald,
A rush of cochineal;
And every blossom on the bush
Adjusts its tumbled head,–
The mail from Tunis, probably,
An easy morning’s ride.

Summer Story

Mary Oliver

find out more about Mary Oliver
at the Poetry Foundation.

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine
and the funnels

of the blossoms,
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,

I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in the world

that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power–
that nobody owns

or could buy even
for a hillside of money–
that just
float about the world,

or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines
and how here I am

spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling
so that I feel I am myself

a small bird
with a terrible hunger
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast

it is only a heartbeat ahead of breaking
and I am the hunger and the assuagement
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight and shaking

Tawny Owl

by Gillian Clarke

a biography is here at Gillian Clarke’s website

 

Plainsong of owl

moonlight between crucieform

shadows of hunting.

 

She sings again

closer

in the sycamore,

 

her coming quieter

than the wash

behind the wave,

 

her absence darker

than privacy

in the leaves’ tabernacle.

 

Compline.Vigil.

Stations of the dark.

A flame floats on oil

 

in her amber eye.

Shoulderless shadow

nightwatching.

 

Kyrie. Kyrie.

 

 

The Dead

By Billy Collins

A profile is here at the Poetry Foundation

The dead are always looking down on us, they say.
while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,
they are looking down through the glass bottom boats of heaven
as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,
and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,
drugged perhaps by the hum of a long afternoon,
they think we are looking back at them,
which makes them lift their oars and fall silent
and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

 

 

 

The Orange Rug

By Julia Copus

A biogrpahy is here a the Royal Literary Fund

 

for Antony and David

Impossible to picture a time without it there
beneath the living room window, afloat in the shadows
of our father’s desk. Its flattened tassels were the rays of sun
in a child’s drawing; it was where we must gather,
three breathless children, our coats on for school,
or to show who was first to be ready for bed,
and if we’d a score to settle
this was where we must do it.

When was the last time we stood there,
myself and my two, fly brothers,
in the days before their bodies hardened and wives
and children hovered round them?
It is late, perhaps – a splash of moon at the window.
Outside, a row of curtained houses
looks blindly away from two small boys and their sister,
who have not even thought to arrange the order
of their going. Nonetheless there must be one
who steps off ahead of the others, as if at some whisper
from the wings, and does not think to look back.

Tonight, in the small hours, I stand there again
in the shadows that leaked from the oak-dark desk;
only this time I am stiller, keener, I’m
poised, like Cassandra – listening out
for those wily, soft-voiced exit cues,
with both knees locked, my fists and eyes
squeezed, clenched, so that nothing exists
but brothers and me and the orange rug,
round as a spotlight, round as a sun,
and the hum of its solar wind unspent inside it.

 

 

 

When it Came

by Sam Riviere

a biography is here at the Poetry Foundation

 

I could see clouds in my coffee

clouds in my phone

satellites like the skeletons of dragonflies

were orbiting the planet

from the train I saw a cloud of birds

wow there were birds in my coffee

birds in my phone

as if everything on earth were texting

furiously everything else I could feel

their texts arriving in my body

this has been a blue/green message

exiting the social world

 

 

 

Any Fool Can Get into an Ocean

by Jack Spicer

a biography at the Poetry Foundation is here

Any fool can get into an ocean
But it takes a Goddess
To get out of one.
What’s true of oceans is true, of course,
Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming
Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed
You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess
To get back out of them
Look at the sea otters bobbing wildly
Out in the middle of the poem
They look so eager and peaceful playing out there where the
water hardly moves
You might get out through all the waves and rocks
Into the middle of the poem to touch them
But when you’ve tried the blessed water long
Enough to want to start backward
That’s when the fun starts
Unless you’re a poet or an otter or something supernatural
You’ll drown, dear. You’ll drown
Any Greek can get you into a labyrinth
But it takes a hero to get out of one
What’s true of labyrinths is true of course
Of love and memory. When you start remembering.

 

Keeping Quiet

By Pablo Neruda

translator unknown

A biography is here at the Poetry Foundation

 

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

For once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.
Life is what it is about;
I want no truck with death.

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves,
and of threatening ourselves with death.
Perhaps the earth can teach us
as when everything seems dead
and later proves to be alive.

Now I’ll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Has My Heart Gone To Sleep?

by Antonio Machado

a biography of the poet is here

 

Has my heart gone to sleep?

Have the beehives of my dreams

stopped working, the waterwheel

of the mind runs dry,

scoops turning empty,

only shadow in side?

 

No, my heart is not asleep.

It is awake, wide awake.

Not asleep, not dreaming –

its eyes are opened wide

watching distant signals, listening

on the rim of vast silence.