Sunflower Elegy

Hannah Smokler | Fall 2023

I mourn August sunflowers that never bloomed —
The world is more empty without them.
Fields are not flowers, they belong
to deer and plane crashes and fire.
No sweet sparks of yellow,
just green and brown and grey
morality, not the kind from fiction, but
the messy kind, the ugly kind, the real kind.
I sort everything into categories:
soil / flower, sun / storm, good / bad,
but nothing is that simple on a day like
today, when the sky is heavy with rain and
fog lingers over the field and everyone is silver.