Sunflowers

"Keep your face to the sunshine
and you cannot see the shadow.
It's what sunflowers do."
by Helen Keller

 

 

 

How can you be anything but happy when looking at Sunflowers?

 

This is a field of sunflowers outside of Spokane, Washington that I travel past on my way to visit my sister.  Last summer I stopped and took some photographs of this field and some sunflowers up close.

 

For some reason I have been unable to grow these happy flowers in my yard since I have moved in the house I live in now.  So this is the summer I hope to get some of these flowers growing somewhere in my yard.

 

 

 

I remember when I was younger and Mom grew some big sunflowers in the backyard.  I took the seeds from the flower and roasted my own sunflower seeds to eat.

 

 

Mary Oliver does a good job of capturing a field of sunflowers in the following poem.

 

The Sunflowers

By Mary Oliver

 

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
those 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.