I am astonished at the sunflowers spinning

a new poem

by Derek Walcott

in huge green meadows above the indigo sea,

amazed at their aureate silence, though they sing

with the inaudible hum of the clocks over Recanati.

Do they turn to face the dusk, just as an army

might obey the last orders of a sinking empire,

their wheels stuck in one rut before the small studs

of stars and the fireflies’ meandering fire,

then droop like exhausted meteors in soft thuds

to the earth? In our life elsewhere, sunflowers

come singly but in this coastal province

there can be entire fields of their temporal powers

spread like the cloak of some Renaissance prince,

their banners will wilt, their gold helms fill the void;

they are poems we recite to ourselves, metaphors

of our brief glory, a light we cannot avoid

that was called heaven in Blake’s time, but not since.