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Hummingbird

Consider the way each Spring contains the shadow of Winter,
a persistence of time, the predictable strains –
but how each blossom itself is a new birth;
or rather, a rebirth which contains both the shadow of its demise
and the humbling recognition of
past frailty.

Holding you I cradle an infinite task.

I am the blossom-breaker.
Yours is a perennial death

I recall the injured hummingbird somehow trapped within my room:
child’s mercy baffling, my cousin and I donned gardening gloves
and for two days fed sugar-water to the tiny helplessness
trembling in our hands.

But consider the recklessness of a bird, who, having flown into a room,
welcomes the creatures that gravitate towards its suffering;
or the way that eyes, when suffering, contain the gravity of all life,
of all dead birds and the opposite of their feathers