Poem for Wednesday and McKee-Beshers Plants

The Sunflowers
By Mary Oliver

Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
 
creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky
 
sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy
 
but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young –
the important weather,
 
the wandering crows.
Don’t be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
 
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds –
each one a new life!
 
hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,
 
is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come
 
and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.

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Tuesday involved a bunch of chores, too much time arguing about political things on social media, and big afternoon thunderstorms that brought rain we needed but had our cats very unhappy. Older son is finally feeling better, so now of course my throat isn't feeling great, though I suspect that's the weather and the pollen. 

My Voyager group watched "Basics, Part II" after sorting out technical issues -- Zoom has misbehaved for one of us every time we've used it the past few weeks -- then we watched the final episode of Wallander, which was very though but the whole show has been excellent. Growing at the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area: