Poetry

Dancing in the Air

A poem about ephemerality

What is it like to dance in the air?

To float upwards through a tunnel of light?

To dive through the softening pink of dusk?

Or to flit through the morning’s soft glow?

Do the hummers know that they live in beauty….

…when they sip from a tulip, or when the light catches their iridescence,

melting it from the deepest hue of peacock blue to dazzling emerald,

blazing fire at their throats?

What do they feel when their wings catch the breeze

or their hatchlings emerge from tiny speckled eggs,

opening their eyes to a booming, buzzing world?

Is it the same as when we open our eyes for the very first time?

Or perhaps…as when we leave this world in dreams or in death,

and are able to see the realm below from a different perspective….

For in the end, we all dive through that tunnel of light

and spread our wings to soar to another plane.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if the hummers accompanied us on that journey towards the infinite….

at least a little of the way….

as we dive into the rosy glow of sunset and merge into the liquid gold at the horizon?

I think I might have heard them there,

in one of those small moments between life and death,

when I danced among the treetops, tasting tranquility,

while the air shimmered with golden dust that streamed from the sun

to enfold me in her arms

and the birdsong filled the space around me, that wasn’t actually space,

and I drifted on waves that lapped another shore….

But, I didn’t quite get there…to the warmth of that embrace.

Although I felt the tug, it wasn’t time.

So, now, perhaps it is almost as beautiful to me

to imagine that the hummers can bridge the realms of reality

and return, to glitter with an otherworldly shimmer

in the diamond bright rays of the sun.

(This poem is based upon a day many years ago, when I, literally, “died” after being run over, and experienced a few blissful moments of “dancing in the air.”)

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