Christmas Party
We step through double doors into a wide,
bright room filled with polished surfaces
and the voices of sixty or so guests.
My daughter’s school friend whisks her away
as her father sees me eyeing the massive beams
spanning the ceiling. “Old-growth, from Canada,”
he tells me, but really, I should see their house
in Boise. He shows me to a rich array of catered dishes
spread across dark quartz. As I fill my plate,
I hear a woman laughing at the sore losers they are,
the people protesting the president’s threats
against immigrants. Behind her, through a wall
of glass, ten feet high and strung with white lights,
a wooden cross shining in the falling snow.
More talk, wine, more rooms, then my daughter,
ready to go, and as I reach for our coats,
I look down to find a hummingbird lying on the slats
of a heating vent. No misplaced ornament, I see
as I pick it up, but real iridescence that is less than air
on my palm. My daughter reaches one slim finger
toward its wings stuck in an emerald X
just as the hostess finds us. “How in the world…”
and I see how it slipped through a door left open
at summer’s end as they were packing for the next house.
The door swung shut, and the hummingbird was left
to zip and swing through all that vaulted space,
to perch on leather and brass, and patter like a great
and solitary bee against the many sun-splashed windows.
Months later, with such luxury and no way to live, this
shimmery mummy. Another guest walks up
and grabs my wrist, saying, “Oh, can I have it?
I could make something!” reaching for her purse.
Our tires glide through the new snow. Perhaps
remembering all the hummingbirds that blurred their way
to our feeders to sip all summer, my daughter asks,
“Will it be OK?” I stare into the bright tunnel our lights make,
all the flakes sweeping down like snipped wings.
What we have made comes back in the snap of that black purse.
Originally appeared in The Southern Review.
Derek Sheffield is the 8th poet laureate of Washington State (2025-2027). He received a 2024 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry. His other collections include Not for Luck, winner of the Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize judged by Mark Doty, Through the Second Skin, runner-up for the Emily Dickinson First Book Award, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy. He teaches at Wenatchee Valley College and Western Colorado University, edits poetry for Terrain.org, and can often be found in the woods along the eastern slopes of the Cascade Range near Leavenworth, Washington.
Read other Letters to America by Derek Sheffield: “Abortion Wish” and “Report from America Auténtico,” a Letter to America poem translated into Spanish by Rhina P. Espaillat, plus more poetry: two poems, and one poem.
And read other Letters to America online or in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published in partnership with Trinity University Press.
Original header photo by fotografie4you, courtesy Shutterstock.
