The last reading of my US tour was a return visit to Poetry Santa Cruz where I was adopted as an honorary local when I read my poem 'The University among the Redwoods, Santa Cruz' from my fourth collection The Treekeeper's Tale. The morning before I flew home, my hosts Tom and Ellen took me to Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. We then had a picnic in a hummingbird arboretum in the grounds of the uni, right in front of the hummers' favourite Grevillea bush, where dozens of Anna's Hummingbirds were doing their dive-bombing displays into the ruby clusters. It was heaven! The birds were too fast to photograph but here are my shots of the coast redwoods earlier that morning. I wrote the poem, which is part of a sequence, when I last read for Dennis Morton at Poetry Santa Cruz in 2005 and you can read it on the Santa Cruz News.
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