Sunflowers - Written and read by Mike Harding

A shaky phone-cam filmed it all and so

The whole world sees a peasant woman finding

Strangers in her land do what peasants always do

For strangers as she ignores the guns and stands

Four 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: handfuls

Fistfuls of sunflower seeds, little pods of grace

And welcome. It is the way with peasant people

Everywhere, 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 bury

You in Ukraine's soil, sunflowers will climb from out

Your 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 to

The murdered children and the families

You bombed out of their homes; the flowers

Will stretch their golden faces to the sky

And in the night the flowers will whisper

Softly to the wind, ‘Here lie the murderers

That 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 seeds

Each year so that those to come will understand

Their stories, stronger than granite,

More beautiful than marble,

These sunflowers will tell the world

How your young lives were wasted here

On our rich soil made richer by your bones

And flesh, and then your own mothers will come

Throughout the empty years

To water with their salty tears

The endless fields of flower heads,

That reach to the horizon bright

Yellow under a clear blue sky, turning in the sun.