This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
On the surface, Hummingbird sounds like a nature song, four minutes built around a small bright bird and a plea for it to stay. Jim Seals, who wrote it with his musical partner Dash Crofts, said plainly in a 1991 interview that the bird was never really the subject. It stood for Baha'u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i Faith, and the song was Seals and Crofts' own attempt to speak on behalf of humanity in asking forgiveness for how the world treats the people sent to teach it something true.
Seals put the pattern in blunt terms: every one of the world's great teachers, when they arrive, gets misunderstood, and the first response is to strike out at them, to jail them, to torture them, sometimes to kill them outright. Baha'u'llah's own life fit the pattern exactly. Declared a threat by the Persian and Ottoman authorities of his era, he spent decades in exile and imprisonment, including years in the fortress city of Akka, for teaching a message of unity among the world's religions that his opponents heard as something closer to sedition.
The refrain, Hummingbird, don't fly away, works two ways at once. On one level it is a small, ordinary plea to keep a beautiful thing from leaving. On the level Seals actually intended, it is an apology addressed backward through history, sung to a movement that both duo members belonged to, asking a persecuted teacher not to give up on a species that keeps meeting its prophets with violence. Baha'i scripture supplies the song's actual language in places, giving the metaphor a textual anchor rather than leaving it as songwriter's invention alone.