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A Poem for Ukraine

I’d been working on this poem for some time and getting nowhere with it. When the Russia/Ukraine war broke out, I learned that the sunflower is the national flower of Ukraine, and finally the poem found its purpose.

OCTOBER SUNFLOWER

Rooks have plucked your sun-struck eye,
mining seeds to nourish the dead.
The bone-white sun of August has singed
your florets. Head piked, the down-turned

mouth of the outcast twisted with defeat,
and bearing now the blackened mask
of summer's rout, slumping crownless
on autumn's mute gallows. Blind worshipper

from the land of the one-eyed,
amid the slag of spent leaves you turn
your back on us, to the brooding furrows
and the dead weight of the sky, waiting

for the earth to reclaim its wreckage.
Heliotrope, when the corona mounts its zenith,
the solar pulse will once again toughen your spine
and, like the broken heart of this word,

you will be driven once more into flower.