Good morning friends. As promised, I’ve got a new poem
from Mary Oliver’s brand new book: Red Bird.
This book was expected out April 4th or 5th, so for those
of us who can’t get enough of Mary Oliver, it was a real
treat that publication happened a week earlier.
Enjoy…
Summer Story
When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into 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 this 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 now 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.
~Mary Oliver
Leave a Reply