My Hummingbird Friend

My final visit to my grandparents’ house
Some forty years ago
A house on stilts on the eastern bank
Of the mighty Demerara
Flowing, silt brown to deep Atlantic

The house where my mother was born
The house where I was born
And every morning on the balcony I sat
And every morning she came to visit
Mercurial, swooping, fluttering

Iridescent, lustrous, shimmering in the sun
Shamrock, jade, emerald, every shade of green
She went from lilac, to orchid, to bellflower
To passionflower, each day a different order
Overwhelmed by nature’s benevolence

Then another dwelling she’d go to grace
But now I near my twilight years
I think oft of my friend aglow
And I recall the house on stilts
And my grandparents, long gone