We learned a new piece at choir yesterday and it was so joyful, I thought you might like to hear it. The music is by Mozart.
Sunflowers
A shaky phone-cam filmed it all and soThe whole world sees a peasant woman findingStrangers in her land do what peasants always doFor strangers as she ignores the guns and standsFour 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: handfulsFistfuls of sunflower seeds, little pods of graceAnd welcome. It is the way with peasant peopleEverywhere, 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 buryYou in Ukraine’s soil, sunflowers will climb fromYour 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 toThe murdered children and the familiesYou bombed out of their homes; the flowersWill stretch their golden faces to the skyAnd in the night the flowers will whisperSoftly to the wind, ‘Here lie the murderersThat 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 seedsEach year so that those to come will understandTheir stories, stronger than granite,More beautiful than marble,These sunflowers will tell the worldHow your young lives were wasted hereOn our rich soil made richer by your bonesAnd flesh, and your own mothers will comeThroughout the empty yearsTo water with their salty tearsThe endless fields of flower heads,Golden, turning in the sun.”