A shaky phone-cam filmed it all and so
The whole world sees a peasant woman finding
Strangers in her land do what peasants always do
For strangers as she ignores the guns and stands
Four square and strong and offers them a gift,
Those soldiers with their guns and bandoliers,
Grenades and wire cutters, their killing knives.
Their helmets and their gibbering headsets.
She holds out to them her gift: handfuls
Fistfuls of sunflower seeds, little pods of grace
And welcome. It is the way with peasant people
Everywhere, even in this day of days,
For those who have the least will always give the most.
But the seeds came wrapped in words,
These words,
“Keep them in your pockets boys so, when we bury
You in Ukraine’s soil, sunflowers will climb from
Your graves toward the blue sky of the truth:
Here take them, they are good, I harvested them last year.
Take them so that the flowers will be a monument to
The murdered children and the families
You bombed out of their homes; the flowers
Will stretch their golden faces to the sky
And in the night the flowers will whisper
Softly to the wind, ‘Here lie the murderers
That came out of the East, unwelcome and unwanted,
Destroyers of beauty, carriers of madness,
Cursed for all eternity.’
The fields of flowers will drop their seeds
Each year so that those to come will understand
Their stories, stronger than granite,
More beautiful than marble,
These sunflowers will tell the world
How your young lives were wasted here
On our rich soil made richer by your bones
And flesh, and your own mothers will come
Throughout the empty years
To water with their salty tears
The endless fields of flower heads,
Golden, turning in the sun.”
