Sunday, February 10, 2008

Longing for the Sun

Golden beauties
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
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 in the earth
so uprightly burning.

Mary Oliver


This is for Wildflowers in Winter.
Ladybug you won the book and if you would send me your email I will mail it out.

21 comments:

Anonymous said...

Beautiful. I love sunflowers. A memory of summer.

Anonymous said...

I love sunflowers.
People tell me they are weeds.
If that is true,
Then I love sunweeds.

Monique Kleinhans said...

I won? I won! I very rarely win!

I'm SO HAPPY!...I feel like one of your beautiful sunflowers! :)

YAY!!!!

kimberly said...

sending you some sunshine, yolanda....77 beautiful degrees here in arizona today.

my husband is from oregon and his family is still there.....so we visit often....and trips to the coast are a requirement.....i'm a native arizonan, but my heart longs for a place by the ocean....

thanks for visiting....

Elizabeth Joy said...

I'm glad you shared sunflowers for Wildflowers in Winter. They are so beautiful. I love how they turn their head across the sky to follow the sun every day.

Molly said...

Lovely poem and lovely sunflowers. Mary Oliver does do justice to the sunflowers in her poem.

Carver said...

Beautiful field of sunflowers and a beautiful poem too.

Jan said...

So lovely.

I'm leaving on Monday for MD, so I will find your book when I get home--as it hasn't arrived yet. That will be nice to come home to!

Lilli & Nevada said...

That is beautiful and we all can use those beautiful flowers right about now with all the nasty weather we all have been getting.

Jenni said...

Oh my goodness! I LOVE this photo!

Joni said...

What a beautiful poem. Sunflowers have always been my favorite! They are so perfectly formed and so sturdy in the ground making their presence known...absolutely love them.

Karen said...

I'm longing for the sun and flowers, too (windchill down to the single digits!)--warm days are coming!

Dick said...

Very nice photo, it looks Sunny.
Thank you for your visit.

virtual nexus said...

Stunning sunflowers - such a crisp shot!

Judy Merrill-Smith said...

I love your sunflower photo! I'm also a big Mary Oliver fan.

Angela Marie said...

Oh Yolanda! I love Mary Oliver ~ Beautiful poem. And that photo! What a sight for sore eyes. Gorgeous, vibrant and alive!

Wonderful post!

Anonymous said...

nice picture, and great poem.

Mimi said...

what a beautiful bright poem for reading on a cold snowy day!!
Love it...

blessings said...

Oh yes, Summer... Spring... Sun... hurry along!! Blessings... Polly

ellen b. said...

What a beautiful photo and the poem is lovely too. Wildflowers in Winter has been such a fun blog carnival...

storyteller said...

This is such a perfect picture to illustrate this lovely poem. Thanks so much for sharing both.
Hugs and blessings,