Saturday, is a first day of the weekend.   For most of us, a day for chores, those more involved projects that cannot be included in the routine housekeeping.  By routine, I refer to cleanup after the delivered pizza is consumed, or making the bed after you’ve risen into the mornings sunlight.  That sounds like ordinary life.  Parts of our lives have been “ordinary” despite the restrictions of the quarantine.  That is unless one is ill with fever, a cough, suspect of having a bout with cornavirus, or unless you are a healthcare worker caring for the ill in ICU aware that some will die no matter what you do for them.  I shouldn’t forget many who live close to me, now in fear of losing the job that provided a basic living, working perhaps as a short order cook, or as a server.  How quickly will the regulars return when the quarantine is lifted?  No one can say.

Nature comforts us with the regularity of the seasons.  With rare exception spring returns with the tilt of the earth’s axis, and the sun’s increasingly direct rays upon the dark earth.  Birds, and all other less visible living things respond to the increasing warmth with vigor.

How unlike the sudden, precipitous swings in human behavior triggered by human purposes,  — insecurity, self-absorption, revenge, indolence, etc.  Just a few descriptive adjectives or adverbs to indicate the ways a sense-of-self may be misshapen, mal-adapted to the social and natural environment.  “Plays well with others,” is a compliment.

This morning I offer photographs pointing to the benevolence of spring.  A poem as well shows in sparkling language how special the gift of life really is.

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GREEN FLAME

By Pamela Uschuk

Slender as my ring finger, the female hummingbird crashed
into plate glass separating her and me 
before we could ask each other’s name. Green flame, 
she launched from a dead eucalyptus limb.  
Almost on impact, she was gone, her needle beak 
opening twice to speak the abrupt language of her going, 
taking in the day’s rising heat as I took
one more scalding breath, horrified by death’s velocity. 
Too weak from chemo not to cry 
for the passage of her emerald shine,
I lifted her weightlessness into my palm. 
Mourning doves moaned, who, who, 
oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body 
sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine

I wrote ‘Green Flame’ from notes I made while I was undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. When a hummingbird flew into our dining room window, I heard the small thunk and saw her lying on her side on the brick sill. I rushed out to find her still alive, but she died, a living jewel, in the palm of my hand. I could not save her. Watching the vibrant awareness leave her eyes, I realized her life, her suffering and death were just as crucial and important as mine.”
—Pamela Uschuk

Pamela Uschuk’s book, Refugee, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. She is an editor for Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts and teaches writing workshops at University of Arizona’s Poetry Center.

Thanks to the Academy of American Poets for this fine poem.

https://poets.org/poem/green-flame