Elegy for Sunflowers

Ferrick Gray

for Poetry Showcase

I look out the window and it's all green —
green grass, much greener than the ink I use.
Kind Nature plays at dressing up again.

I use those words like KIND, but it's not true,
not all the time, BUT the green is pleasant,
easy on the eyes. Good and bad live here.
So many people here upset the calm
and steal away the beauty of the day.

They stole my flowers, all my sunflowers
are gone. I say mine because I loved them,
I spoke to them, I smiled with them and swayed
with them. But GREED has MURDERED them. ALL DEAD!
Their smiling faces, once sun worshipers,
ALL GONE! And them, the people, killed them all.
"Our home", they say. All monuments to death.
Cruel death of beauty, murderers of LIFE —
Now all I see are HOUSES fenced with PINE.

Society is shameless in its goal
to conquer, take at any cost but GREED
thinks differently. Take it now, blood money.
"Show me some coin and I will SHAKE YOUR HAND,
all these yellow 'Christs' mean NOTHING AT ALL."

I mourn their death, but sometimes I still smile
when looking out the window at the green,
but there's no yellow anymore, just green.