Summer Story - A poem by Mary Oliver

Hummingbird (Stacy Wills, 2013)

alcohol inks on ceramic tile + sacred altering

Summer Story

by Mary Oliver

When the hummingbird

sinks its face

into the trumpet vine,

and 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 the 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 how 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 heart beat ahead of breaking---

and I am the hunger and assuagement,

and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,

and, like them, I am full of delight and shaking