Hummingbird
       

Knocking against my Southwest window,
I mount a feeder, inviting her vandalism.
And though a guest with too delicate a coat,
she never drops a feather, an unfulfilled parable,
while inside our losses gracelessly accrue
without logic or pattern, and we wonder at that:
what prepares a bird for so much failure
when all her body's work amounts to maintenance,
no spare change from a day's sugar water,
no breakthrough in song. no new nest.
My uncle dies on Christmas. My father
apologizes for crimes that went unnoticed
through fifty years of knowing. I've never
had a sibling. can't conceive of the collation,
but there are lessons I want to teach him
about birds, how they dare keep everything
precious in one place. The elastic safety
of the hummingbird's three eyelids
designed to protect her during flight.
She can close her lids and this spare space,
shut more light than a human eye, draw it
from a wound to guide the silence after.

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Copyright © 2018 Maya Catherine Popa All rights reserved
from You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave
New Michigan Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission