UNEXPECTED SUNFLOWERS

You radiant sunflowers that abound
on Thirtieth Street and Tenth Avenue
spectacular where no one would expect you,
but I know, my birthday comes around,
to look there for you lush on barren ground
with your coarse leaves and buds cut like beau-
tiful emeralds.

Let me pick a few
of these wildflowers native among abandoned
trucks and empty freightcars and warehouses
and bring them home and put them in a vase.
I cannot look away. Their symmetry
is Mediterranean and their energy
Northern, and each has the majesty
of the sun alone in the blue sky.


Paul Goodman,
by "Homespun of Oatmeal Gray
- Poems by Paul Goodman".
Vintage Books (Random House) New York, 1970.