Hummingbirds Poem by Linda Hepner

Hummingbirds
Are descended from dinosaurs
And long ago
Their ancestors
Lumbering through the forest
Looked up and smelled the sweetest scents
From blossoming palms and cyclids,
So the gentle theropod
Stretched high and raised his undulating neck
Like Alice hovering above the trees
Too far to see beneath the canopy
Where lurked below – beware! – the carnivores.

He only ate the leaves
And then withdrew;
No time, no armor and no courage to pursue
The phantom perfumes under sun and moon.
But generations passed and that first memory
Imprinted like first love
Within the deep cells came unsolved in dreams
And dinosaurs, disturbed
By fleeting intimations of a soul
And spirit flying skyward
Died unblessed, unredeemed,
Squashed in the strata of the soil.

One day a cell escaped –
She flew away, her DNA intact,
But all her bones in miniature,
Her scaly skin transformed to feathers,
Arms and claws transposed to wings for flight,
Her hungry jaw remolded into tongue and beak
As if for His amusement God one day
Looked through the wrong end of His telescope
And thought He’d make a doll’s house of the world.

The little cell flew up,
a minute helicopter
Buzzing like a bee,
And there she found her million year old wait
Was over: high above the canopy of trees
She met God’s heaven,
Orchid trees and scented trumpet flowers,
Honeysuckle vines and blue wisteria,
Perfumes that had haunted her old ancestors
Now hers, hers for the sipping, sucking, sleeping
In, and not a night to fear there down below
Except for one small cell that lurked deep in her brain:
A fear of falling to the dank
Dark humus, there to die
And lie beside her lumbering ancestors.

But let me soar - and let me be
Blithe spirit, lark
Inspiring poets, or the operatic mocking bird
Whose hundred songs wake me at night
In great delight;
I too shall fall
One day, but until then
Let me believe I am a jeweled humming bird
Lifting off, escaping, to and fro
In heavenfuls of colors, scents and sounds – time, time is not
Yet, not, not of the essence,
Yet.

LRH
10.pm 3.21.09