top of page
SL-Hummingbird front.jpg

Contact

Reach out with any questions or requests!

Let's Chat

Email

Thanks for submitting!

Summer Story
by Mary Oliver

When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into 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

©2025 by Ma Bridges. Powered and secured by Wix

bottom of page