Contributor Series 9: If Men Had Ears
Because I Am No Hummingbird
By John Sibley Williams
This song I cannot sing,
why do you keep falling
into rivers?
Why do you cross each border
without me?
Why don’t you climb from my mouth,
already adapted to this world,
calling all gravities together
around you
beneath you
like a hummingbird?
Because
I am no hummingbird
and can never be one–
its silent impact on things,
its inability to know the bottom,
to lift and scatter
silt and mud
and to live comfortably
in this new amalgam.
Song,
you are the recognizable part
of an archetype–
disembodied and proportionless–
merely and idea
following closely behind
what I need you to be.
John Sibley Williams’ poetry will appear at vox poetica later in 2011.
