Hummingbirds I Have Met

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 this world that aren’t pieces of gold or power------- that nobody owns or could but even for a hillside of money----- that just float in the world, or drift over the fields, or into the gardens, and into the tents of the vines, and now 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 the assuagement, and also I am the leaves and the blossoms, and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking. Hummingbirds in a Summer Story by Mary Oliver