Showing posts with label hummingbird. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hummingbird. Show all posts

Saturday, April 15, 2023

Hovering Sipper

I expanded the cinquain form here to 7 lines--a septtain? 2, 4, 6, 8, 6, 4, 2 syllables per line. Syllabics can be pleasurable--for the writer, at least--sometimes. 


Hovering Sipper

A hum-
ming bird, its back
iridescent green, its
gray wing-blur wrapping its body,
sips shots from the powder blue
rosemary blooms.
April.

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

All He Could Manage To Do

I'll tell you what. I'll tell you
a man cut grass and picked up trash
and sat down then. He thought
about America's most recent
consolidation of white-supremacist
power, became queasy. Thought
of vomiting on the cut grass but
did not. A hummingbird

visited a nearby rosemary bush,
pale blue blossoms fluffed out
modestly like women's
handkerchiefs in 1911. Hummingbird
throat-chirped when it backed off
a blossom, and again when it
air-wheeled itself back for another
nectar-strike. The man made
a powerless choice. He let

sight and sound of one bird
help him breathe out of his
disgust and go more lightly
through next tasks. It was pitiful.
It was all he could manage to do.


hans ostrom 2019


Tuesday, September 4, 2018

Remember: It's About Adaptability

A gull with a fish in its mouth
flies low. A steller's jay cackles
maniacally as it dives toward a
task. Comes a couple of woos
like wind through a hole in a wall:
a dove. Crows shift their feet
on a street corner as if considering
a labor strike, a starling
gossips at the top of a pole,
and a hummingbird, tough
as a boot, not cute, pierces
awareness. All of this within
an hour's time. Birds seem
to own this place, mortgage
free, indefinitely. They're better
at Earth-living than we.


hans ostrom 2018

Friday, July 21, 2017

A Sultan at Sunset

Thirty feet up, the hummingbird hovered,
looking at sunset behind blue, wrinkled
Olympic Mountains. After a long day
of nectar-hauling, why not? Sitting facing

East, I watched the bird watch. I then
saw it trace with its body an enormous
precise circle in air.  Wondering what
or if this circle signified was a gift

grand enough for a sultan.  The invisible,
unforgettable shape suggested geometric
graffiti, avian ritual, or a secret signal
to the sun.  I almost applauded.

The whirring bird zipped off to close
the astounding performance: what a pro.
As Sultan, I decree my hummingbird
equal to Whitman's eagle, Poe's raven,

the crows of Ted Hughes and Al
Hitchcock, Shelley's and Mercer's
skylark, and Bukowski's murdered
mockingbird. (I refuse to discuss

Yeats's rapist Zeus-goose.) The effect of
this decree, the Sultan does not know.


hans ostrom 2017