Sunflower Poems And Quotes

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns?

And I want to play hide-and-seek and give you my clothes and tell you I like your shoes and sit on the steps while you take a bath and massage your neck and kiss your feet and hold your hand and go for a meal and not mind when you eat my food and meet you at Rudy's and talk about the day and type up your letters and carry your boxes and laugh at your paranoia and give you tapes you don't listen to and watch great films and watch terrible films and complain about the radio and take pictures of you when you're sleeping and get up to fetch you coffee and bagels and Danish and go to Florent and drink coffee at midnight and have you steal my cigarettes and never be able to find a match and tell you about the tv programme I saw the night before and take you to the eye hospital and not laugh at your jokes and want you in the morning but let you sleep for a while and kiss your back and stroke your skin and tell you how much I love your hair your eyes your lips your neck your breasts your arse your and sit on the steps smoking till your neighbour comes home and sit on the steps smoking till you come home and worry when you're late and be amazed when you're early and give you sunflowers and go to your party and dance till I'm black and be sorry when I'm wrong and happy when you forgive me and look at your photos and wish I'd known you forever and hear your voice in my ear and feel your skin on my skin and get scared when you're angry and your eye has gone red and the other eye blue and your hair to the left and your face oriental and tell you you're gorgeous and hug you when you're anxious and hold you when you hurt and want you when I smell you and offend you when I touch you and whimper when I'm next to you and whimper when I'm not and dribble on your breast and smother you in the night and get cold when you take the blanket and hot when you don't and melt when you smile and dissolve when you laugh and not understand why you think I'm rejecting you when I'm not rejecting you and wonder how you could think I'd ever reject you and wonder who you are but accept you anyway and tell you about the tree angel enchanted forest boy who flew across the ocean because he loved you and write poems for you and wonder why you don't believe me and have a feeling so deep I can't find words for it and want to buy you a kitten I'd get jealous of because it would get more attention than me and keep you in bed when you have to go and cry like a baby when you finally do and get rid of the roaches and buy you presents you don't want and take them away again and ask you to marry me and you say no again but keep on asking because though you think I don't mean it I do always have from the first time I asked you and wander the city thinking it's empty without you and want what you want and think I'm losing myself but know I'm safe with you and tell you the worst of me and try to give you the best of me because you don't deserve any less and answer your questions when I'd rather not and tell you the truth when I really don't want to and try to be honest because I know you prefer it and think it's all over but hang on in for just ten more minutes before you throw me out of your life and forget who I am and try to get closer to you because it's beautiful learning to know you and well worth the effort and speak German to you badly and Hebrew to you worse and make love with you at three in the morning and somehow somehow somehow communicate some of the overwhelming undying overpowering unconditional all-encompassing heart-enriching mind-expanding on-going never-ending love I have for you.

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we're blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.

In your hands The dog, the donkey, surely they know They are alive. Who would argue otherwise? But now, after years of consideration, I am getting beyond that. What about the sunflowers? What about The tulips, and the pines? Listen, all you have to do is start and There’ll be no stopping. What about mountains? What about water Slipping over rocks? And speaking of stones, what about The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats So secret, so hidden it may take years Before, finally, you hear them?

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time, Who countest the steps of the Sun: Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveller's journey is done. Where the Youth pined away with desire, And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow: Arise from their graves and aspire, Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Which way will the sunflower turn surrounded by millions of suns? This is my rocket my personal rocket I send up my message Beyond Someone to hear me there

maybe i did just love the idea of you. but god, it was such a good idea.

The head of all flower heads is one flower; the sunflower in the sky, that gives the others vivid color stemming from the inside.

Sunflowers, Not Facing the Sun (A Poem) I stand tall As gracious as one could be Blooming to my best As slender as it touches my being Everyone else is facing the sun Bending towards its unfathomable galore They and I are both undoubtedly Grown on the benevolence of life’s essence The brighter side mercilessly feeding desires unbound By daunting the “courage to know” with each spin Though, I am not able to face the sun the way they do Yet, I learn from the knowledge bred within me Beyond achievement markers, but an adverse ability An opportunity to exercise my special self From the cherubic attire of my blessed soul To the unfathomable mystery the drape of this world hides That I, by not facing the sun Hunt the gems in the milieu of the human existence

Fanfare for the Makers A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what? To the small fire that never leaves the sky. To the great fire that boils the daily pot. To all the things we are not remembered by, Which we remember and bless. To all the things That will not notice when we die, Yet lend the passing moment words and wings. So fanfare for the Makers: who compose A book of words or deeds who runs may write As many who do run, as a family grows At times like sunflowers turning towards the light. As sometimes in the blackout and the raids One joke composed an island in the night. As sometimes one man’s kindness pervades A room or house or village, as sometimes Merely to tighten screws or sharpen blades Can catch a meaning, as to hear the chimes At midnight means to share them, as one man In old age plants an avenue of limes And before they bloom can smell them, before they span The road can walk beneath the perfected arch, The merest greenprint when the lives began Of those who walk there with him, as in default Of coffee men grind acorns, as in despite Of all assaults conscripts counter assault, As mothers sit up late night after night Moulding a life, as miners day by day Descend blind shafts, as a boy may flaunt his kite In an empty nonchalant sky, as anglers play Their fish, as workers work and can take pride In spending sweat before they draw their pay. As horsemen fashion horses while they ride, As climbers climb a peak because it is there, As life can be confirmed even in suicide: To make is such. Let us make. And set the weather fair. Louis Macneice

On the Necessity of Sadness" Let me tell you about longing. Let me presume that I have something new to say about it, that this room, naked, its walls pining for clocks, has something new to say about absence. Somewhere the crunch of an apple, fading sunflowers on a quilt, a window looking out to a landscape with a single tree. And you sitting under it. Let go, said you to me in a dream, but by the time the wind carried your voice to me, I was already walking through the yawning door, towards the small, necessary sadnesses of waking. I wish I could hold you now, but that is a line that has no place in a poem, like the swollen sheen of the moon tonight, or the word absence, or you, or longing. Let me tell you about longing. In a distant country two lovers are on a bench, and pigeons, unafraid, are perching beside them. She places a hand on his knee and says, say to me the truest thing you can. I am closing my eyes now. You are far away.

A rural Venus, Selah rises from the gold foliage of the Sixhiboux River, sweeps petals of water from her skin. At once, clouds begin to sob for such beauty. Clothing drops like leaves. "No one makes poetry,my Mme. Butterfly, my Carmen, in Whylah,” I whisper. She smiles: “We’ll shape it with our souls.” Desire illuminates the dark manuscript of our skin with beetles and butterflies. After the lightning and rain has ceased, after the lightning and rain of lovemaking has ceased, Selah will dive again into the sunflower-open river.

Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

Without the tender rays of your love, I am nothing but a withered sunflower.

You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!

Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!

i have no room for men who act like wolves anymore.

It is hard to remember the day it is today For days that don’t shine Sun-Day is hard to forget in my memory For days that sunflowers

Agapanthus and peonies in June. Scented stock and sweet peas in July. Sunflowers and sweet William in August. By the time September's oriental lilies and ornamental cabbages appeared, she wasn't hiding upstairs in the workroom anymore. She was spending more time in the shop, answering the phone, dealing with the customers. One Sunday she spent the afternoon at an allotment belonging to a friend of Ciara's, picking lamb's ear and dusty miller and veronica for a wedding, and didn't think about Michael once, but she kept remembering a Patrick Kavanagh poem she'd learned at school, the one about how every old man he saw reminded him of his father.

Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so fondly to-day, Were to change by to-morrow, and fleet in my arms, Live fairy-gifts fading away, Thou wouldst still be adored, as this moment thou art, Let thy loveliness fade as it will, And around the dear ruin each wish of my heart Would entwine itself verdantly still. It is not while beauty and youth are thine own, And thy cheeks unprofaned by a tear, That the fervor and faith of a soul may be known, To which time will but make thee more dear! No, the heart that has truly loved never forgets, But as truly loves on to the close, As the sunflower turns on her god when he sets The same look which she turned when he rose!

Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the sun away. Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray Clutch and cling? Chill Fingers of yew be curled Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still At the still point of the turning world.

To fill the days up of his dateless year Flame from Queen Helen to Queen Guenevere? For first of all the sphery signs whereby Love severs light from darkness, and most high, In the white front of January there glows The rose-red sign of Helen like a rose: And gold-eyed as the shore-flower shelterless Whereon the sharp-breathed sea blows bitterness, A storm-star that the seafarers of love Strain their wind-wearied eyes for glimpses of, Shoots keen through February's grey frost and damp The lamplike star of Hero for a lamp; The star that Marlowe sang into our skies With mouth of gold, and morning in his eyes; And in clear March across the rough blue sea The signal sapphire of Alcyone Makes bright the blown bross of the wind-foot year; And shining like a sunbeam-smitten tear Full ere it fall, the fair next sign in sight Burns opal-wise with April-coloured light When air is quick with song and rain and flame, My birth-month star that in love's heaven hath name Iseult, a light of blossom and beam and shower, My singing sign that makes the song-tree flower; Next like a pale and burning pearl beyond The rose-white sphere of flower-named Rosamond Signs the sweet head of Maytime; and for June Flares like an angered and storm-reddening moon Her signal sphere, whose Carthaginian pyre Shadowed her traitor's flying sail with fire; Next, glittering as the wine-bright jacinth-stone, A star south-risen that first to music shone, The keen girl-star of golden Juliet bears Light northward to the month whose forehead wears Her name for flower upon it, and his trees Mix their deep English song with Veronese; And like an awful sovereign chrysolite Burning, the supreme fire that blinds the night, The hot gold head of Venus kissed by Mars, A sun-flower among small sphered flowers of stars, The light of Cleopatra fills and burns The hollow of heaven whence ardent August yearns; And fixed and shining as the sister-shed Sweet tears for Phaethon disorbed and dead, The pale bright autumn's amber-coloured sphere, That through September sees the saddening year As love sees change through sorrow, hath to name Francesca's; and the star that watches flame The embers of the harvest overgone Is Thisbe's, slain of love in Babylon, Set in the golden girdle of sweet signs A blood-bright ruby; last save one light shines An eastern wonder of sphery chrysopras, The star that made men mad, Angelica's; And latest named and lordliest, with a sound Of swords and harps in heaven that ring it round, Last love-light and last love-song of the year's, Gleams like a glorious emerald Guenevere's.

MY FATHER If I have to write a poem about my father it has to be about integrity and kindness — the selfless kind of kindness that is so very rare I am sure there will be many people living somewhere who must be as kind as him but what I mean to say is I have not met one yet and when it comes to helping others he always helps too much and as the saying goes — help someone, you earn a friend. help someone too much, you make an enemy. — so you know the gist of what I’m trying to say here anyways I was talking about the poem about my father it has to be about passion and hard work because you see you cannot separate these things from him they are part of him as his two eyes and two hands and his heart and his soul and his whole being and you cannot separate wind and waves or living and the universe or earth and heavens and although he never got any award from bureaucracy the students he taught ages ago still touch his feet and some of them are the people you have to make an appointment to meet even if it is for two minutes of their time and that’s a reward for him bigger than any other that some of his colleagues got for their flattery and also I have to write about reliability as well because you see as the sun always rises and the snowflakes are always six-folds and the spring always comes and the petals of a sunflower and every flower follows the golden ratio of symmetry my father never fails to keep his promise I have to mention the rage as well that he always carries inside him like a burning fire for wrongdoings for injustice and now he carries a bitterness too for people who used him good and discarded as it always happens with every good man in our world of humans and you must be thinking he has learned his lessons well you go to him — it does not matter who you are if he knows you or you are a stranger from other side of the world — and ask for his help he will be happy to do so as you must know people never change not their soul in any case.

There is a monstrous garden in the sky Nightly they sow it fresh. Nightly it springs, Luridly splendid, towards the moon on high. Red-poppy flares, and fire-bombs rosy-bright Shell-bursts like hellborn sunflowers, gold and white Lilies, long-stemmed, that search the heavens' height... They tend it well, these gardeners on wings! How rich these blossoms, hideously fair Sprawling above the shuddering citadel As though ablaze with laughter! Lord, how long Must we behold them flower, ruthless, strong Soaring like weeds the stricken worlds among Triumphant, gay, these dreadful blooms of hell? O give us back the garden that we knew Silent and cool, where silver daisies lie, The lovely stars! O garden purple-blue Where Mary trailed her skirts amidst the dew Of ageless planets, hand-in-hand with You And Sleep and Peace walked with Eternity..... But here I sit, and watch the night roll by. There is a monstrous garden in the sky! (written during an air raid, London, midnight, October 1941)

MY FATHER If I have to write a poem about my father it has to be about integrity and kindness — the selfless kind of kindness that is so very rare I am sure there will be many people living somewhere who must be as kind as him but what I mean to say is I have not met one yet and when it comes to helping others he always helps too much and as the saying goes — help someone, you earn a friend. help someone too much, you make an enemy. — so you know the gist of what I’m trying to say here anyways I was talking about the poem about my father it has to be about passion and hard work because you see you cannot separate these things from him they are part of him as his two eyes and two hands and his heart and his soul and his whole being and you cannot separate wind and waves or living and the universe or earth and heavens and although he never got any award from bureaucracy the students he taught ages ago still touch his feet and some of them are the people you have to make an appointment to meet even if it is for two minutes of their time and that’s a reward for him bigger than any other that some of his colleagues got for their flattery and also I have to write about reliability as well because you see as the sun always rises and the snowflakes are always six-folds and the spring always comes and the petals of a sunflower and every flower follows the golden ratio of symmetry my father never fails to keep his promise I have to mention the rage as well that he always carries inside him like a burning fire for wrongdoings for injustice and now he carries a bitterness too for people who used him good and discarded as it always happens with every good man in our world of humans and you must be thinking he has learned his lessons well you go to him — it does not matter who you are if he knows you or you are a stranger from other side of the world — and ask for his help he will be happy to do so as you must know people never change not their soul in any case.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate golf, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate gold, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.

I don’t know where prayers go, or what they do. Do cats pray, while they sleep half-asleep in the sun? Does the opossum pray as it crosses the street? The sunflowers? The old black oak growing older every year? I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive. Is a prayer a gift, or a petition, or does it matter? The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way. Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not. While I was thinking this I happened to be standing just outside my door, with my notebook open, which is the way I begin every morning. Then a wren in the privet began to sing. He was positively drenched in enthusiasm, I don’t know why. And yet, why not. I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe or whatever you don’t. That’s your business. But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer? So I just listened, my pen in the air.

Whitman, you once told me, is democracy on the page, messy and imperfect as we are in real life, which gave you hope that we would one day make real life true democracy, ripe blossom, pollen dusting every moment and person, each scampering mote of light. This is why as you lay dying, I read “I Hear America Singing” and knew you heard every word and could feel my hand on yours though you were already moving toward other miracles than this life. A sunflower followed your motion and a yellow dog stood guard. You, who lived the notion that the sun belongs to each and every one, beggars, dreamers, kings, all. You who believed banks could have hearts, for god’s sake! You have left it to us, messy and imperfect as we are and will be, to keep to the work side by side and as long as it takes, all the while singing of miracles just as Whitman and you taught us to do.

Suppose you could speak nothing but money And acrimony. Suppose all the sunflowers Van Gogh destroyed, all the stones in Virginia’s Pockets & all the stones Georgia painted as vaginas Were simply a matter of making something greater Than money. Prince taught us a real man has A beautiful woman in him. Suppose we cannot Forget what happened in Money. Suppose You’re someone who celebrates Thomas Jefferson’s Birthday. Suppose he was someone whose love For a black woman was blinded by blackness, Hers & his, yours & mine. I ain’t mad at you, Assassin. It’s not the bad people who are brave I fear, it’s the good people who are afraid.

Let me love you! Let us tend to our life like a flower, Tender, beautiful, without any conflict, Let us fill our senses with this flower, And put an end to every emotional conflict, Let our feelings be like the sunflower, Always thinking of and staring at the Sun, Let us radiate with the beauty of the sunflower, And allow our love to be our everlasting Sun, Let my every feeling rush towards you, Like the waves rushing to the shore, Then let me sink into you, And no more shall I ever seek any other shore, Let me be the song of the Summer joys, The song of happy brooks, the tender fluttering of flowers, Let me lend you all these Summer joys, And in you create my gardens of love and beautiful flowers, Let me share all my secrets with you, Like the wind that shares hers with trees, flowers and everything, Let me feel every part of you, And like the wind, cover you, your shadows and everything, Let me be the Moon that shines every night, Mild, faint, subtle, light; yet bright enough, To let me see you everywhere even in the darkness of the night, And in the day under the Sun too, because seeing you forever is not enough, Let me be that every reason that makes you happy, Then glide gently across the territory of your mind and heart, Let me be this feeling that always makes you feel happy, And then my love Irma, l shall let my feelings be a part of your heart.

She was that lass I loved to admire when she plucked roses in her Charlotte novels she beamed like sunflower, when she laughed at romantic lines, I loved her little sequin nuggets those fine details about her, those indefinite little prose. Her smell made me wonder, Do books have frankincense? I loved to stare at her favourite book by

Her face and the garden Her face is like a summer garden, By divine beauty tended and by grace never forsaken, There bloom roses many, and lilies too, And I keep looking at it, for in spell bound state what else can I do, Yesterday she was a garden of roses, Last year she was the entire spring, where once in bloom, the beauty’s flower never closes, This year she has transformed into a garden blooming with new flowers, Daisies, daffodils, and sunflowers standing like beauty’s radiant towers, Rendered more radiant in the never ending splendour of her eyes, And the garden of beautiful roses growing all over her, even time defies, While I watch the garden of beauty grow over her face, My heart beats assume a new and lovely pace, That draw my mind into this world of endless beauty, And I know not whether it obeys my heart’s yearnings or it too has grown fond of her pure serenity, The summer has found a permanent residence in her face, infact within her, Because I still see the roses blooming over her face although it is late November, And when sometimes she brushes her hair with her fingers, The roses peek from her face to feel her finger tips and their magical wonders, And when she rests her eyelids upon her eyes, The pollen dust of million flowers, upon her waiting eyelashes, a perfect sheen applies, That neither sparkles nor glows, But in the garden of her face it simply in its splendour grows, And when the winter sun gets tired and retires finally, The lilies apply the mask of radiance on her tenderly, While the violets and narcissus seep deep into her brow, And what a wonder she is to look at now, A beauty with no end, where waves of summer flow interminably, As she rests her head on the pillow and closes her eyes slowly, The morning glory turns into the night glory, And then begins our own love story, Where the lovely and winding creepers grow all over us, over her and over me too, Finally the garden of beauty grows all over us, and now it shall be so, no matter what you do, I in the garden of her beauty where flowers bloom everywhere, And then my heart confesses, “Irma, let us hide in this garden somewhere, To be never found by time, and never felt by any season, Because finally we have found love in each other that defies every reason,” And this is how it has been for many years now, I and my every feeling of love sinking deep into her beauty’s eternal brow!

It’s not a bad thing if the sunflowers outshine the sun.

White encouraged Updike’s equally scrupulous commitment. They bonded over dashes, colons, and commas—most amazingly in an exchange of letters in the last two months of 1954 concerning two poems, “The Sunflower” and “The Clan.” She wanted to make his punctuation consistent; he wanted to make his light verse flow in a manner pleasing to the ear and the eye. When he suggested changes to the proof of “Sunflower”—literally begging for a colon rather than a dash at the end of a particular line (“A colon is compact, firm, and balanced: a dash is sprawling, wishy-washy, and gawky. The colon suggests the Bible: the dash letters and memoirs of fashionable ladies”)—she replied with a three-page “treatise on punctuation” and a transcription of the relevant paragraph from H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (the standard reference at The New Yorker, thanks to Harold Ross, who always kept a copy handy). She urged him to “try to feel more kindly toward the dash”—and closed with characteristic graciousness: “I want to add that I am delighted to find anyone who cares as much as this about punctuation and who is as careful as you are about your verse. . . . And I thank you for a very interesting and amusing letter.

If at any point of time you are short of confidence, pause and remind yourself of all that you have done. Tasks which you did and only you can do. Sketching, writing a poem, taking care of plants, helping your friend through his difficult time. Celebrate the unique person you are and be proud of your uniqueness. We are all uniquely gifted to do things in a beautiful manner. All that we require is someone to believe in us in order for us to scale the heights.

America, this is what my God has told me about you— you field of dying sunflowers, you semiautomatic gun slinging unsanctuary, you apparition that is the crowd gathered beneath yet another oak tree on the postcard— Justice is not a pendulum Justice is not a hammer Justice is not a bandage it is water, and your better angels have long sung of its rolling tide, calling those things which are not as though they were. Am I crazy, America, letting you inside me again and again though you do not even love me...

It was a line from this very poem, actually, the Ginsberg sunflower poem, a line that seemed written exactly for her, a quick jolt that seemed to slap her awake. It summed up exactly how she felt about her life even before she knew she felt it: Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower?

Passing a road called Laurel Canyon, I remembered a folksinger with a record named that and near-expected her to show up with a basket of sunflowers. Or Neil Young would amble toward me in a fringed leather jacket. Or J. D. Salinger himself, who’d become my mentor and order up poems from me like so many diner pancakes…. (What hurts so bad about youth isn’t the actual butt whippings the world delivers. It’s the stupid hopes playacting like certainties.) At one point a town car glided up, and my heart bounded like a doe as the window silently slid down. But it was a wrinkled lady in tennis whites, asking in bad Spanish if I was Luz from the agency.

It is hard to remember the day it is today For days that don’t shine Sun-Day is hard to forget in my memory For days that sunflowers

A Magic Hour’s Dreaming by Stewart Stafford Is there a sight more fair than wheaten fields, Awaiting the sun's ambush to potently ignite? Colour vibrates beyond the eye revealed, To live, dance and breathe in honeyed light. Nature’s palette, painted hues so bright, Invites the bees to sip and man to dream, Of engineered art, dazzling to the sight, Authored lightning in a celestial seam. The creator’s canvas, mint beyond decay, Invites the inner child to replenish at source, Where Nature’s staff casts shadows away, Friendships bond as a trickling stream's course. An eyeblink flash carved in history's tree, Treasured riches pooled of those by our side. For in sepia’s sunflower memory, We court the hand of an agreeable bride. Fading birdsong underscores this bottled time, In butterfly hearts, the hourglass stilled sublime. Autumn's leaves, ochre embers, curtsied fall, Farewell Summer, until roused in New Year's call. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.