By Charles M. Sumid      Copyright 2025      Written 1983

This morning the world hummed with small industries:
bees heavy with purpose, gnats rising
in columns of barely visible light.
The hummingbird visited each trumpet vine,
methodical as a lamplighter making rounds.

Twenty minutes ago she was threading lupines,
her tongue a hair’s width reaching for sweetness.
Then the air changed: pressure dropping
like a stone through honey.
She knew before the first thunder.

The hummingbird weighs less than a penny,
heart beating twelve hundred times per minute.
Now she presses herself against the cedar’s trunk,
wings folded tight, a jeweled apostrophe
clinging to bark.

Below, in tall grass bending almost horizontal,
fireflies pulse their cold morse, still signaling
through thunder, through rain that must feel
like falling houses to bodies made
of light and longing.

A child watches from the kitchen window,
nose pressed to glass. “Will they be okay?”
Her mother’s hand touches her shoulder:
“See how they hold on? Even the smallest things
know how to wait for storms to pass.”

Later, when the cedar stops its thrashing,
when grass lifts itself upright blade by blade,
the child will see the hummingbird
unpeel herself from bark, test the air
with one tentative hover,

then zip away, a green spark
returning to its rounds.