ART + POETRY: ELAINE WOO

A Vortex by Elaine Woo

HOPE OF THE HUMMINGBIRD

For the past decade, severe wind storms have battered the little community I live in on the Pacific Coast.
 
Leg-thick tree limbs have busted roofs, littered lawns, flattened bushes, and felled old trees in our adjoining forest.
 
This spectre is climate change. Elsewhere, the world is burning. What can one person do?
 
Our solution is simple. During fall, we hang up a hummingbird feeder, seed feeders for larger birds, and a suet feeder for winter.  We nourish the most vulnerable creatures of the forest, without discouraging their natural ability to forage.
 
The small, bright glow of hope of our hummingbird friends inspired this poetic honouring:
 
 
Shimmering red tweed on green
 
our tiny guest
 
wings beat time
 
its needle dips deep
 
into the slit of our offered feeder’s
 
yellow plastic petals
 
your forest retreat thinned
 
climate-peril windstorm
 
our serving a small buffer
 
against a grievous global surge
 
of natural tragedies
 
one shock-absorber stands firm

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

"A Vortex" previously published in print in Otoliths, issue fifty, part two, southern winter, 2018 and online at the-otolith.blogspot.com

"Hope of the Hummingbird" first published by Elephant Journal,  September 25, 2019

Elaine Woo has long engaged in the discourse on environmental justice through her poetry and visual art.  She would like to see many more join in and take action in ways, big or small, as able.  She is the author of the collections Put Your Hand in Mine, 2019 and Cycling with the Dragon, 2014.