Tuesday, July 30, 2013

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

4 comments:

  1. Oh my goodness, Stacy, your painting is sooo beautiful! I love the colors, and the wonderful filigree hummingbird! There is such delight in this painting. And the Mary Oliver poem suits it so well...

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  2. Thank you, Christine! I added the hummingbird with a stamp using a gold ink pad. The tile was done by blasting the alcohol inks with a blow dryer while they were still wet. It's a fun technique. I had not read that particular Mary Oliver poem before. The lines that really stopped me in my tracks were: "...spending my time, as the saying goes, watching until the watching turns into feeling..."

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  3. So many layers of meaning in your painting, and what a beautiful marriage of words and image. Thank you for this special gift today. xoxox

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  4. You are most welcome, dear Edith! :-)

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