Labor Day is the annual American holiday to celebrate the achievements of our workers. It is meant to honor the dedication and dignity of American workers who power our nation's prosperity. The deepening divide in the material well-being of those who provide the work and those who own the means of production should be a clear alarm for the continued viability of capitalism as an enduring social model. The following poem about the miracle of the hummingbird may be a bit tangential, but pleasing to me nonetheless. Hope yours has been a good holiday.
"Levitation"
A hummingbird lights on a woody stem of the cantua,
perches there stilled and looks around. An Anna's,
the feathers on its neck catching the light
as it moves its head in the jerky motions
of a movie dinosaur and tilts its beak toward the sky,
the gesture of humans who think well of themselves,
though I think the bird might be thinking about ants
or small spiders. Or maybe it is just taking the air.
It's late June. The morning had been foggy, marine mist
blowing in from the Pacific in billowing gusts,
so it is only now in the early evening that the fog
has burned off and the summer air settled in.
Maybe the bird is watching whatever interests it
in the same way that I am watching the bird.
The flowers of the cantua withered weeks ago,
the cascade of scarlet trumpets that seem to have been made
for hummingbirds (which means that they were made
by hummingbirds) dangle down in small, shriveled clusters.
The white flowers of the climbing rose have also withered.
Floribunda: the creamy blossoms so abundant on the trellis
I didn't like to cut bunches of them to take inside,
though I knew, of course, that they die one way
or the other, in the house or on the vine. The hydrangea
has only just begun to blossom, the clusters
of their flowers a white tinged faintly with pale green.
Also the fuchsia with its slim, graceful, pale pink flowers
is just beginning to bloom. There are clocks in seeds,
the one that turned off the cantua and the one that turned on the hydrangea.
And the hummingbird's heart is a clock. Mine, too.
When I look up from registering this fact,
it is gone. Probably working the nectar in the fuchsias,
wings beating so rapidly they almost seem not to be there.
- Robert Haas, former poet laureate
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