Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

An Evening of Hummingbirds

They rule the backyard tonight.
One by one, those dark blurs zip to the feeder,
where their tiny jade bodies materialize.
Sometimes they hover in front of the red-blossom
glass mouths. Other times, they rest
on the thin black perches.
Either way, they always come to drink
our mother’s homemade sugar water.
From the patio, I swear I can see their fine tongues
flicking in and out, in and out,
from their needlepoint beaks,
even though all that is obvious is the constant
dipping of each hummingbird’s head,
back and forth, back and forth.
You count the bobs of each head—
this one, we think, is up to sixteen—
but neither of us humans have dared to move
anything other than our mouths.
Even our rocking chairs are uncreaking and in place.
The last thing we want to do is scare away
our after-dinner guests, especially since
they are still coming, one at a time,
darting in for their sweet meal, then darting off again
as if each ruby-throated boy or white-scarved girl
is waiting in queue—

And then two arrive within seconds of each other.
Clearly, one of them is impatient,
and neither likes to share,
because the moment the newcomer glides too close,
the first diner springs at him—
and off they chase.
Faster than we can blink,
the jeweled bombers fill the August evening,
circling and swooping over and past our heads,
green and white and red flashes in their aerial sparring—
and it makes me laugh, this twist-and-turn ride
where I’m outside and in the middle of their roller coaster dogfight.
Then again, isn’t this how all evenings should end?
With the whirling sensation of witnessing
and living something so electric,
so charged with air and wings
and small, small muscles,
and with the sureness that, for once,
your heart must be pumping as fast as a hummingbird’s,
a thousand beats per minute.

Sara Letourneau is a poet as well as a book editor, writing coach, and writing workshop instructor. Her debut poetry collection, Wild Gardens, will be published by Kelsay Books in 2024. Her work has won the Beals Prize for Poetry and first place in the Poetry category of the Blue Institute’s 2020 Words on Water contest. Recent and forthcoming work can be found in Remington Review, Nixes Mate Review, Didcot Writers, Portrait of New England, Amethyst Review, and Soul-Lit, among others. She lives in Foxboro, Massachusetts.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx