Hua

Alone and alert in relentless light,
Consider those sunflowers in the wind,

The ones that don’t look like sunflowers yet,
Ankle-high fistfuls of green leaves only

Distinguished by already displaying
The ostentatious habit of tracking

The sun’s position in the windy sky.
What earthly connection possesses them

To strive for their daily doses of light?
Dirt turns into leaves that turn toward sun.

As much as now’s known about how it’s done,
Don’t pretend you can state why life is life.

Transformation is the go-to concept
For poets wanting the way to accept

Yet also to transcend dissolution
And death, from Tao Yuanming to Walt Whitman.

Embrace the ways all myriad things change
And return to live as a blade of grass,

Or a swiveling sunflower, perhaps.
But transformation goes for everything,

While death goes only for lives, not the rest.
Poets, notable less for our insights

Than for bright transformations, more or less,
Of ideas into memorable phrasings,

Are the last thinkers likely to solve this.
Still, in moments of physical comfort,

Tao with his wine jug, Whitman in the grass,
Old thoughts green up again to track the light.