Proof of life
Half-hidden
In dewy milkweed
By the lake
Is a centerfold
From an old
Playboy magazine.
A kid looks down from the road.
I’m a girl, she says.
The pods break,
And the seeds blow away
Before
hummingbirds, Sweetheart,
there was plutonium.
Before plutonium,
hummingbird
tongues, as quarks
are called in this poem, were all
the rage. Before quarks,
and rage, and sorrow, there was tohu
bohu, which is not, Thank Heavens,
sushi made from tofu and tears,
which probably does exist
somewhere on this unhappy
planet, but language from
Genesis, which I read as feathers
of every color flying in all directions at
once from a prior destruction,
which, at a touch, reassemble
as a hummingbird of every color
hovering before a honeysuckle
blossom in the garden of a God
we do not, cannot, comprehend,
hovering, hovering, hovering…
for what seems less than an
instant, and more than an eternity.
I am a retired physician, although my poetry, especially now, is non-medical. I have published a full-length collection, titled, bill, through Proem Press and four chapbooks, at, respectively, Unsolicited Press, White Knuckle Press, Epiphany magazine (contest winner), and Prolific Press.