Sunday Poem

Vancouver Island

The hummingbird beak-deep in fireweed makes
clumsy the worming robin, but that brown
orangey breast brightens the greens of the lawn
so the bluish green blacks of the firs are deepened.   How
many greens there are – grass, fern, cedar, each has a thousand.

Now I can see the grays of the sea – silver to not-quite
black, and now the blue-gray, white-gray, gray-gray clouds,
and now the spoor of an invisible wind moving   up
the Juan de Fuca Strait – out towards a vast shining.

by Nils Peterson