Poem for the Vernal Equinox

 
Finally, spring arrives with its abundance of work and pleasures. Since all the little birds rustling around our gardens herald the season, here's a bird poem in celebration of the equinox. Who but D.H. Lawrence could evoke a giant, scary hummingbird? ...From the beautiful little book  Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, edited by Billy Collins (Columbia University Press, 2010).

Humming-Bird

I can imagine, in some otherworld

Primeval-dumb, far back

In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,

Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

 

Before anything had a soul,

While life was a heave of mater, half inanimate,

This little bit chipped off in brilliance

And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

 

I believe there were no flowers then,

In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.

I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

 

Probably he was big

As mosses, and little lizards, they say, were once big.

Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.

We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,

Luckily for us.

                                                     

Comments

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Wow! It is really nice and melodious poem for vernal. I also like to write poems and also like to make a collection of all the types of poems so that I can enjoy them. You have created your whole blog really nice.