waiting for hummingbirds

by Eben E. B. Bein

We crouched in tall flowers

Mom and me, peering up 

petaled steeples against 

blue mountains, 

slow tumble of clouds 

from the ridge

             a vividness 

         born of waiting

a bumble bee’s drone 

set the spires 

                          swaying

                    without breezes

in a field 

where no one 

would be grounded 

There. The low 

ruby-throated whirr

of one—no—two

hover at blossoms

like beads         

                         suspended  

                   on a sky necklace, 

then zip away into

a sudden whitening—

the field cloudfallen

and I am still 

as sunshon mist

probing the nectaries

with tongue the length 

of our incandescent 

                                   body 

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook “Character Flaws” is out with Fauxmoir lit and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.