My wife’s garden is as much a work of art as a painting by a master spirit or a poet’s inspired sonnet or a perfectly composed piece of music. How lovely it is to step from the often fractious terrain of coping with ordinary chores and life’s sudden sink-holes and the too often obtuse behaviour of unhelpful fellow-citizens into this haven of green peace and flowers in the wind. It is but a step indeed and life is transformed. How many possess such a benefit for a lifelong time. If you are a believer in God make a holy sign. If you do not believe then bow in gratitude for the pleasure and peace great Nature has been pleased to bestow.
One of the glories of the garden is the hummingbirds. They visit at all times but especially when the sky is filling with the last gold light of day – an incandescent blessing, incomparable intricacies of flight, a shimmering amid the green leaves. They are the most marvellous of birds.
Their hearts, the size of a pea, are the largest of any bird in proportion to their mass – they pound frantically at 1,200 beats a minute – which means, I am intrigued to learn, that these miniature jewels of creation, so small, so fragile, so delicate, enjoy a life span the same as human beings – about one billion heartbeats long.
When they visit the garden the hummingbirds completely enrapture me as they flit from flower to flower, their tongues darting 17 times a second as they sip for nectar in the blooms in the dusky garden light. How fortunate one is to observe such exquisite beauty.
Not long ago there was a moment when I held a hummingbird in my hand and for that extraordinary moment saw its beauty up close. I wrote a poem about what happened.
Throwing A Hummingbird
these lines make no particular point
just if any reader sees them
they might suggest that everything
is miracle and mystery all one’s life
my study window overlooks the garden
branch of bougainvillea trails upwards
within my reach this last month
this morning a hummingbird tangled in it
fluttered and fell onto the desk
stunned and still I seized it quick
I swear I felt its beating heart
saw closer than I ever will
the soft green feathers at is breast
threw that green-gold shred of light
soaring flashing heavenwards again
this happened once in eighty years
And so at any given instant one can suddenly experience the marvellous. At whatever age life is a series of miracles, hummingbirds gleaming in the dusk.
