Green Flame by Pamela Uschuk

Green Flame

by Pamela Uschuk

Slender as my ring finger, the female hummingbird crashed

into plate glass separating her and me

before we could ask each other’s name. Green flame,

she launched from a dead eucalyptus limb. 

Almost on impact, she was gone, her needle beak

opening twice to speak the abrupt language of her going,

taking in the day’s rising heat as I took

one more scalding breath, horrified by death’s velocity.

Too weak from chemo not to cry

for the passage of her emerald shine,

I lifted her weightlessness into my palm.

Mourning doves moaned, who, who,

oh who while her wings closed against the tiny body

sky would quick forget as soon as it would forget mine

Fourteen lines, two definitive sections with a volta (lines 8 and 9 nine are the end and the start where a huge change occurs), heavy on description, no meter or end rhyme (although lots of language play)--yep, I'm calling it! This is an American sonnet.

The first 8 lines are sad--any death is sad, but innocent creatures dying is a special type of sadness. The poet wisely relates the death while surrounding it in gorgeous descriptions: green flame, needle beak, abrupt language, etc.

The last 6 lines bring in the speaker as more than just a witness to this hummingbird's death. We learn that the speaker is going through chemo and it has weakened her. She lifts the tiny bird up--my favorite description of the bird is here: emerald shine-- and that action puts the focus on both the speaker and the bird.

Mourning doves--what other bird would you put in this poem?--become a Greek chorus of sorts. Their cooing of "who" sets us up for the last line, which moves the poem from sad, nature, connection, birds, cancer, etc. into a deeply philosophical poem. The speaker tells us that the sky will soon forget this little bird and that it will also forget her once she dies; of course, this applies to all of us.

As with many wonderful poems that start in one place and end in a very different place, I feel like the movement here is tangible and an important part of the poem. And movement is important to this poem in many ways; the hummingbird's movement results in death, the speaker's movement to cradle the bird solidifies their connection (as ours as readers), and the knowledge that the sky (the earth, the stars, the oceans, etc.) will continue after we are all gone is also movement.

This poem is in Uschuk's 2022 book, Refugee, published by Red Hen Press. It is also on her website, http://www.pamelauschuk.com/. Her 2009 collection of poetry, Crazy Love, won an American Book Award. Both are filled with poems just as marvelous as Green Flame. You can buy Refugee here and Crazy Love here. She has many other books as well.