Member-only story
Sunflowers
a poem about sunflowers
Of everything that you had made of your life, it was
the sunflowers you most wanted me to see. How tall
they stood, as if holding up the small building
beside the house, how straight they rose to the sun.
We were listening to new age music, an endless ribbon of
piano that kept pulling at me like taffy while your voice
made its familiar slow circling dance. It was spring,
the sky dark and shaken with thunder.
The stalks, you said, grew so strong that they could be used
as stakes for next season’s tomatoes. I could see the tiny bits
of colored cloth fluttering in a sudden afternoon wind, see
the clean lines of your fingers as they tied fast each strip.
The blossoms grow larger than your head, you said. Sometimes
you sit on the back deck and watch birds pull at the seeds, watch
the flowers bend ever so slightly and then let go.
You give everything away in the fall, you said.
Now I think of the necessary horror, the wet earth,
the fracturing of each seed, the struggle in the darkness…
