Sunflowers
Bleary, lethargic, bumping along in this coach
at eight whatever in the morning
I see in a field there are plants, what are they, sunflowers,
oh, haven’t seen them for a while.
You don’t somehow expect to see something so perfect and grand
growing wild; you imagine them in a hothouse
or tenderly raised by a child from seeds they found hidden in a picture book
about growing things.
The sunflowers all stand, heads slumped, looking away from me, looking down;
they are in mourning, though for what I don’t know. It is one
of the saddest sights in the world
and then my eyes shift along to the three men approaching, farmers,
two holding tools of some kind and the other – is that – a guitar?
It seems too wondrous and Spanish to be true. Then we move closer and
in that moment, that they call red shift,
when a train passes you and its whistle blows momentarily lower,
I see that it is a gun, that they all have guns
and they are advancing
towards the sunflowers
and the skinny dog with them trots along looking
like he would rather not be up at eight whatever in the morning either.
And then they are gone, history,
and the occupants of the next field are solar panels. Again, they glimmer with
almost penetrating grief
and in the next field,
just another cuboid
of hay. It is emotionless, it has seen it all
before and I have seen it before
in so many fields, still, eternal,
reassuring,
a totem.
Elizabeth Gibson’s work has been published in The Cadaverine, Sonder, Under the Fable, Visual Verse, Sincerely Magazine, Sibliní and Ink, Sweat and Tears. She was long-listed for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. She is Fiction Editor at Miracle Magazine and writes for Cuckoo Review and The Mancunion. Since 2012 she has been a Digital Reporter for Manchester Literature Festival. She studies IPML French and Spanish at the University of Manchester and has written a YA novel which she hopes will one day be published. She tweets at @Grizonne and can be found at http://elizabethgibsonwriter.blogspot.co.uk.