Sunflowers ~ For Dad

June 10th is a date which has always been special for me as it marks the day my late father was born  and, as I wrote last year, I associate his birthday very much with sunflowers. He had a great love of nature, colour, art and the sun.

Dad (1919-2010)

I think, too, that he would have liked this poem by Mary Oliver:

The Sunflowers

Come with me

into the field of sunflowers.

Their faces are burnished disks,

their dry spines

 

creak like ship masts,

their green leaves,

so heavy and many,

fill all day with the sticky

 

sugars of the sun.

Come with me

to visit the sunflowers,

they are shy

 

but want to be friends;

they have wonderful stories

of when they were young –

the important weather,

 

the wandering crows.

Don’t be afraid

to ask them questions!

their bright faces,

 

which follow the sun,

will listen, and all

these rows of seeds

each one a new life! –

 

hope for a deeper acquaintance;

each of them, though it stands

in a crowd of many,

like a separate universe,

 

is lonely, the long work

of turning their lives

into a celebration

is not easy. Come

 

and let us talk with those modest faces,

the simple garments of leaves,

the coarse roots of the earth

so uprightly burning.