Hummingbirds by Jeremy Gregersen

HUMMINGBIRDS

I remember reading recently of how

hummingbirds only suckle from lilac

and lavender blooms for their fuel,

their nectarous urge merely the gruel

a weary, calloused farmhand might sock

away, mopping a soaked and furrowed brow

while searching furrows and windrows for real

and lasting bread.  These tiny jewels,

jade and lapis lazuli mood rings they are,

subsist on common bugs.  Like the man—so far

from living on ambrosia and mead—who weekly fills

his tank on far more basic things.  His meals

reclaim my thoughtless waste: a loaf laced with lines

of mold, a half banana half-ripe, the boon

of my wasted yogurt only one day past due,

as the hummers drone off unnoticed through

the web of leaves, leaving only wilted blooms

in their wake.  While they refine sugar into the fine

mystic antigravity of their departing flight,

I gather sticky screwtop bottles from the lawn—

syrupy Boone’s Farm I neither opened nor emptied—

and as the leathern sun comes dappled to the trees

again, I toss them jingling to the recycling bin

thinking of the fuel it takes to get us through the night.