Tuesday, August 20, 2024

Poem for Monday and Indian Independence Day

Humming-Bird 
By D.H. Lawrence 

I can imagine, in some other world
Primeval-dumb, far back
In that most awful stillness, that only gasped and hummed,
Humming-birds raced down the avenues.

Before anything had a soul,
While life was a heave of Matter, half inanimate,
This little bit chipped off in brilliance
And went whizzing through the slow, vast, succulent stems.

I believe there were no flowers, then,
In the world where the humming-bird flashed ahead of creation.
I believe he pierced the slow vegetable veins with his long beak.

Probably he was big
As mosses, and little lizards, they say were once big.
Probably he was a jabbing, terrifying monster.
We look at him through the wrong end of the long telescope of Time,
Luckily for us.

-------- 

We had lovely cool weather on Monday after the rain yesterday. I spent most of the day working on a scanning and editing project, plus laundry and some other chores, so I don't have a lot to report before an afternoon walk to the beach and on the dock, where the coots and grebes seem to be starting to return for the fall. We were visited by several hummingbirds and heard the eagles too. 

We watched parts of two heartbreaking baseball games as both the Orioles and Mariners lost in late innings, and now we're watching some more Secrets of the Zoo: Down Under, which restores my faith in humanity (I can only take the DNC in slow doses, since there is coverage of antisemitism every five minutes). Some photos from the Utsav Mela festival at Marymoor last weekend:

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