Summer Theater

As a bulbous puce spider

sits still in its web waiting
for an insect to stick,
a butterfly bounds through
sunshine, alights to sip water
from a deep green wet leaf.

Bees maul lavendar blossoms.
An iridescent blue dragonfly
cruises by & a hummingbird
pulls up & parks mid-air
to sip nectar from a fire-red
crocosmia flower. Crows

sit on wires, roofs, and branches,
silently picking mites from feathers.
Summer theater, quite show--
I'm glad to see and know it.

hans ostrom 2024

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.

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

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

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