“The Hummingbird” by Kenny Williams

Kenny Williams

THE HUMMINGBIRD

Before they gave a concert

the Greeks would drop copper pots

on marble floors, so

you could hear the silence

reassembling itself, a blank space

for the flute. More like

what we’d call a kazoo.

And what’s with the hummingbird

planted in the mouth?

My mother used to fill a feeder

with water and sugar

and turn up her crooked but decidedly

feminine thumbs.

“The ones that come are this big,”

she would say, for those

of us who won’t rest without removing

our mothers’ hands

with precision saws,

who want to scream

but are afraid to shatter

the silence in which

we’ll have to bite our tongues and hand

their old hands back to them,

priceless pairs

of antique cups

they want to drink from

but can only drop.

—from Rattle #39, Spring 2013
Tribute to Southern Poets

__________

Kenny Williams (Virginia): “I hate it when poets pretend they don’t know anything about their own writing processes and get arty and mysterious when asked about it, claiming in a zillion different ways that they ‘receive’ their poems from the Beyond, or that the poems already exist in the abstract and that they, the poet, just ‘discover them,’ etc. I’ve been hearing a lot of this kind of thing lately. I think it comes in waves. The writing of poems remains, as ever, the manipulation of linguistic materials toward an artistic end residing in form. Never trust anyone who denies this or tries to talk around it. I live in Richmond, Virginia, hold an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and have a website with pictures of dogs and cats on it.” (website)