Tag: hummingbird

hummingbird perched on a limb
Photo by Iesha Reyes on Unsplash

As a Hummingbird

1 August 2026 /

Poetry by Emily Persichetti Schuster

I saw you today
With my first breath of canyon air
You were there

Meandering down the wide gravel path
I saw you as ferns
Edging against the trail

Gazing up at the brilliant cloudless sky
I saw you as a row of evergreens
Lining the rim of the canyon

As the river guided our hike
I saw you as the sparkling stream
Skipping over rocks on the valley floor

The softness of water shaping the valley
With years of patient persistence
Forgiving firmness

And I knew then this is where you belong
I wondered if you’d ever had a chance
To visit this heavenly place

Later, as the sun dipped behind the mountains
I saw you as columbines
Growing straight out of the cliff faces

Taking root in rock
Until I realized you were still the river
And those flowers were me

And I knew then I was here because of you
That so much of who I am still holds pieces of you
Guiding a path I can’t always see

You even came home with us that night
And perched in a tree in the backyard
As a hummingbird

Posted in the highest branch
Watching over my little boy
As he played on the slide and the swings

Emily Persichetti Schuster’s poetry and short fiction is published in Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny (Elderfly Press, 2026) and is forthcoming in Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose. She lives in Athens, Georgia with her partner and their two kids. Find her on Instagram: @empschuster_creative.

Photo by ennif pendahl on Unsplash

Breath

1 February 2024 /

Poetry by Jeff Burt

In the shower from a hose
over tomato vines, an Anne’s hummingbird
entered and rinsed and hovered
a foot from my face, then landed
on my chest to catch a breath,
feet gripping my shirt like a newborn.

I thought of the forty beats
per second of its wings
that I could both hear and feel,
wondered if it slowed and felt the torpor
of stasis come over like sleep,
but in the moment my mind wandered
the hummingbird had flown.

To catch a breath, to enter the mist
and rest on the dusty, arid day–
I thought of the taxi driver
from Eritrea who said he drove
each day until he couldn’t stop,
then he’d stop, he laughed,
he had many mouths to feed,
and hustle is all he knew, cabbie, valet.
When I touched his shoulder,
I could feel his heartbeat slowing down,
body harbor below my hand.

So many months have passed
and he stayed in my thoughts
in the mass where I store
random things I cannot place,
but today I knew,
he was a hummingbird,
beating his wings all day
against the dead air
to stay alive for others,
clutching for a foothold
and turning his throat
skyward for a breath.

Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California. He has contributed to Williwaw Journal, Rabid Oak, and Willows Wept Review, and has a chapbook at Red Wolf Editions and a second chapbook available from Red Bird Chapbooks. Read earlier fiction and poetry in The Bluebird Word.

Click here to sign up for our newsletter today!

© 2026 The Bluebird Word

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑