Life

Prairie Sure

September 05, 2012



I love the images in this poem by Carol Light, of Washington state.

Prairie Sure

Would I miss the way a breeze dimples
the butter-colored curtains on Sunday mornings,
or nights gnashed by cicadas and thunderstorms?
The leaning gossip, the half-alive ripple
of sunflowers, sagging eternities of corn 
and sorghum, September preaching yellow, yellow
in all directions, the windowsills swelling
with Mason jars, the blue sky bluest borne
through tinted glass above the milled grains?
The dust, the heat, distrusted, the screen door
slapping as the slat-backed porch swing sighs,
the hatch of houseflies, the furlongs of freight trains,
and how they sing this routine, so sure, so sure—
the rote grace of every tempered life?

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2011 by Carol Light, whose poems have been published in Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. Poem reprinted from The Literary Bohemian, Issue 12, June 2011, by permission of Carol Light and the publisher.

Simple pleasures

Cloudy With a Chance of Sunflowers

August 02, 2010

“…Bring me the sunflower crazed with the love of light.”--Eugenio Montale


Sunflowers make me smile. Some wonderful soul in our subdivision has planted sunflowers at the corner of our main road and one of the side streets. I see them daily as I drive in and out—one of those simple pleasures that add so much to life. They’re happy flowers—their bright yellows, oranges, even reds and bronzes, echoing the colors of the sun itself.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who finds sunflowers uplifting. Vincent van Gogh created a series of sunflower paintings during two different periods, the first (1887) in Paris, and the second (1888-89) in Arles, France where he hoped to create an artistic community. Several of the paintings were meant to be decoration for a room for his friend Paul Gauguin. For van Gogh, yellow symbolized happiness.

Here are a few more sunflower facts:

The sunflower is one of the few crop species that originated in North America. Native Americans domesticated and cultivated it.

Sunflower oil contains 93% of the energy of US Number 2 diesel fuel and researchers are exploring the potential of sunflower as an alternate fuel source in diesel engines.

The sunflower head is not a single flower as you would think from its name, but is made up of 1,000 to 2,000 individual flowers joined at a common receptacle.

Before blooming, the sunflower is heliotropic: It follows the progress of the sun from east to west in order to receive the maximum amount of sunlight. Overnight, the sunflower will turn its face east once more to meet the sunrise. Once it blooms, the stem usually remains in the east-facing position.

It think one of my next illustrated journal projects is going to be a sunflower—what could be more appropriate?

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