Just off the hummingbird highway
       

down a winding packed-sand road
          with serious crickets
                    nattering in the grassy shoulders,

our right little tight little
          city lies in the path of everywhere else.
                    In half a thousand years

no one has ever mapped all
          its comings and goings. It has

old pastel spirit, patient sea, restless new
walls made of blue glass blocks,
          view-yards where we watch

the deep past
          dance, dive, rise to the angel
                    in the rafters of the squinting sky.

At night it. sleeps
          in the shadows cast
                    by the grass and the sea, the five stars hung

from hooks in the wilderness sky,
          the moon soft and sandy in the west.
                    The river babbles about the gibbons
                              roosting in the trees.

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Copyright © 2012 Eileen Hennessy All rights reserved
from This Country of Gale-force Winds
NYQ Books
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission