Friday, April 2, 2010

The Sunflowers - April 2, 2010


Come with me

into the field of sunflowers

their faces are burnished disks...

Come with me

to visit the sunflowers,

they are shy

but want to be friends;

they have wonderful stories..

Don't be afraid

to ask them questions!

Their bright faces...

will listen, and all

those rows of seeds-

each one a new life!-

hope for a deeper acquaintance;

each f 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..

My tour guide Mary now turns her modest face to me the reader and makes a direct invitation to visit her world. Though she is talking of sunflowers, (is she?) I am seeing fields of people, so many that their shoulders touch. They turn their grateful faces up to the sun and each thought of theirs is a seed for new life in the future. Though they are grateful and with so many others, they, we, are lonely. So there is nothing better than to have one come among us and ask us questions and let us tell them the stories of our lives. Each question asked is a seed for future life. Though our stories may not be the epics that get burned into famous literature that lasts through the generations, they are the universal story - of how each day the questions, answers, and stories are small step to turn our lives into celebration.

What question would you ask a field of sunflowers? A field of humans?

1 comment:

  1. To the sunflowers: Would you be willing to travel through the intestines of a bird, knowing that you sustained it's life?

    To the humans: Would you be willing to travel alone the path of creating your own invention or contributing to genome studies, if you were persecuted for using new lines of stem cells or told you were proceeding the wrong way? Could you be wrong to the majority while right to yourself?

    ReplyDelete