Hummingbirds of Kabul

To be perfectly correct, there are none, hummingbirds being native to America.
But see a likeness like as any:
Weary thousand-mile migrants, by cold mornings perishing of starvation.
Sometime drab heroines, desperately sucking the nectar of blood-red poppies, condemning men to needle sorrow.
Now shimmering, territorial, now evading harassment by a change of garb.
Ambivalent adoptive children of an invasive species droning in the rarefied blue.
Yet to these same, distant cousins -- their soft and our television tongues bequeathed from the same Ukrainian steppe, where we knew each other, and, perhaps, hummed a strange song.