Napo 18

Today was a little tough. I encountered some mild writer's block at the keyboard today. I just didn't know what to write about. I thought about abandoning these prompts altogether, but even then I hadn't the faintest idea of what to do. So I returned to the prompt (sort of), which, today, was to write about morning rituals. Mine are painfully boring. So instead, I thought about the morning rituals of hummingbirds and how they kind of wake from the dead each morning. That's miraculous! Amazing! I want to think more about the metaphoric significance of this, this idea of a daily rising from the dead, a daily resurrection. And how it happens everyday, and we still call our world a mundane place.

Here's what I got down:

Miracle, Wednesday Morning

They can teach you a lot, those hummingbirds,

Spring visitors to my porch with rufous faces,

Buzzing wings and ever-beating hearts,

A blade for a beak.

These tiny bursts of beauty

And toughness

Know how to fight

For a miracle, know how

To survive because they must.

In the early hours of the morning,

Before dawn, the world still shrouded

In darkness, chill still blooming in the air,

One perches on an oak branch,

Encased in its tomb of torpor.

The cold Houston nights can kill—

No way to find the wildflowers,

Those swathes of piecemeal miracles

In the thin patches of grass

Along the highway

In the world’s bitter darkness.

Each night,

A crucifixion of hummingbirds

By the lazy sun, the hesitant flowers,

The hunger deep within us all

For something sweet created

From earth and sky,

happens all around us.

Come night, there’s nothing left.

How, as the sun wrenches

Itself from bed each morning, the stone

Of its heart rolls to life again,

Trusting a miracle will stream

Down promptly, on cue,

As I hum my own morning song.

Today, I will rise. Today,

I fill a feeder with sugar water

And hang this blessing from my porch.