Stalking the Garden Sunbird

In the gloss of morning’s first breath,
a sunbird blurs through the bougainvillea,
a sudden thought in flight. Its wings
hum their luminous hymn, each stroke
an epiphany. It needles
the pink blooms with purpose,
an incandescent hunger so sharp,
so tender, it borders on the holy.
In its world, beauty and hunger
are one. It drinks deep, as if
from the veins of the divine,
its small body carrying
both the burden of light
and the ache of survival.
The garden holds its breath.
Leaves lean close, green ears
straining for the whisper of wings.
Even the sun, stilled by awe,
softens its blaze to watch
this fleeting fragment of itself.
And I, too, become the garden—
rooted, trembling, a vessel of want.
Oblivious to my quiet reverence,
the sunbird flits on. Its smallness
contains the weight of worlds. It is
a map of escape, a moving hymn
to boundlessness. And yet,
I cannot let it go.
I follow, breath held like a prayer,
my shadow swallowed in the vine-dark path.
I disturb nothing, not the rhythm

of its wings nor the ritual of its hunger.
Still, my presence stains the air.
I am no seeker of birds;
I am a thief of its freedom,
chasing the grace it carries,
the way it holds the sky as its own.
It pauses—an ember suspended
against the blue—and then disappears
into the labyrinth of green.
I am left with nothing but
the tremor of its flight, the afterglow
of its movement. My hands,
empty. My heart, a heavier thing.
The garden exhales. Silence returns,
steady as the turning earth.
I walk back, the sunbird now etched
into the margins of my story, though
I will never be etched into its.