Sunflowers

I’m in the world but I still want the world.

I’m full of longing and can’t move,

enthralled in the garden. Having died 

all the way back to the root, I grow again 

into a version of the thing I love. I’m her 

and not her, hermaphrodite with a heart 

like a plateful of black flames.

The bees inspect me like doctors. 

All my hard little tears, future selves 

who haven’t grown. Bedclothes swell on the line

while around me giant sunflowers burn

through their masks of radiant desire. 

Copyright © 2022 by Jenny George. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 2, 2022, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“When I’m working in a deep place, I’m looking for correspondences. I wrote ‘Sunflowers’ to help me think about the cycles of plant life in my garden alongside the cycles of desire and death in human relationships.”
—Jenny George