Poetry
Image source: beatdom.com
01 Sunflower Sutra
Allen Ginsberg
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul,”
“we’re not our skin of grime,”
“we are blessed by our own seed,”
“we are not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive,”
“we are blessed by our seed.”
The poem unfolds at the edge of American industrial civilization, in a railroad yard scattered with tracks, rusting locomotives, soot, oil, and abandoned metal. Walking there with Jack Kerouac, Ginsberg encounters a sunflower—withered, bent, and blackened by coal dust.
This is not the radiant sunflower of an open field. It appears instead as a body discarded by the industrial world: exhausted, damaged, and coated in grime. Yet Ginsberg refuses to see it merely as an emblem of defeat. Within its ruined surface, he recognizes an irreducible vitality: the architecture of seeds, the instinct to turn toward light, and the original memory of the sun.
Image source: wikipedia
02 Ah! Sun-flower
William Blake
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun;
Seeking after that sweet golden clime,
Where the traveller’s journey is done;
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.
Blake places the sunflower within the cycle of time. Day after day, it follows the sun’s course across the sky. Weariness does not make it turn away; instead, it deepens its gaze. Amid changing seasons and passing light, the flower quietly preserves its direction toward a golden realm.
Image source: nicholas-phan.com
