{"id":20,"date":"2008-09-09T15:20:24","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T19:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/?p=20"},"modified":"2008-09-15T18:13:05","modified_gmt":"2008-09-15T22:13:05","slug":"sunflower-sutra-allen-ginsberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/?p=20","title":{"rendered":"Sunflower Sutra – Allen Ginsberg"},"content":{"rendered":"

[audio:sunflower.mp3] (6:23)
\nread by Allen Ginsberg. audio from the Allen Ginsberg Project<\/a>. recorded at Town Hall Theater in Berkeley, CA. March 8, 1956<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and
\n\"\" sat down under the huge shade of a Southern
\n\"\" Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the
\n\"\" box house hills and cry.
\nJack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron
\n\"\" pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts
\n\"\" of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, sur-
\n\"\" rounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of
\n\"\" machinery.
\nThe oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
\n\"\" sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
\n\"\" stream, no hermit in those mounts, just our-
\n\"\" selves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
\n\"\" on the riverbank, tired and wily.
\nLook at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
\n\"\" shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
\n\"\" dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–
\n–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
\n\"\" memories of Blake–my visions–Harlem
\nand Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
\n\"\" Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
\n\"\" treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
\n\"\" poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
\n\"\" knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
\n\"\" and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
\n\"\" past–
\nand the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
\n\"\" crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
\n\"\" and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–
\ncorolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like
\n\"\" a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face,
\n\"\" soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sun-
\n\"\" rays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried
\n\"\" wire spiderweb,
\nleaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures
\n\"\" from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster
\n\"\" fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
\nUnholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O
\n\"\" my soul, I loved you then!
\nThe grime was no man’s grime but death and human
\n\"\" locomotives,
\nall that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad
\n\"\" skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black
\n\"\" mis’ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuber-
\n\"\" ance of artificial worse-than-dirt–industrial–
\n\"\" modern–all that civilization spotting your
\n\"\" crazy golden crown–
\nand those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless
\n\"\" eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the
\n\"\" home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar
\n\"\" bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards
\n\"\" of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely
\n\"\" tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what
\n\"\" more could I name, the smoked ashes of some
\n\"\" cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the
\n\"\" milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs
\n\"\" & sphincters of dynamos–all these
\nentangled in your mummied roots–and you there
\n\"\" standing before me in the sunset, all your glory
\n\"\" in your form!
\nA perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent
\n\"\" lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye
\n\"\" to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited
\n\"\" grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden
\n\"\" monthly breeze!
\nHow many flies buzzed round you innocent of your
\n\"\" grime, while you cursed the heavens of the rail-
\n\"\" road and your flower soul?
\nPoor dead flower? when did you forget you were a
\n\"\" flower? when did you look at your skin and
\n\"\" decide you were an impotent dirty old locomo-
\n\"\" tive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and
\n\"\" shade of a once powerful mad American locomo-
\n\"\" tive?
\nYou were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a
\n\"\" sunflower!
\nAnd you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me
\n\"\" not!
\nSo I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck
\n\"\" it at my side like a scepter,
\nand deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul
\n\"\" too, and anyone who’ll listen,
\n–We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread
\n\"\" bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all
\n\"\" beautiful golden sunflowers inside, we’re bles-
\n\"\" sed by our own seed & golden hairy naked ac-
\n\"\" complishment-bodies growing into mad black
\n\"\" formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our
\n\"\" eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive
\n\"\" riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sit-
\n\"\" down vision.<\/p>\n

(Berkeley, 1955)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[audio:sunflower.mp3] (6:23) read by Allen Ginsberg. audio from the Allen Ginsberg Project. recorded at Town Hall Theater in Berkeley, CA. March 8, 1956<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-new-hip-moon"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/poem.oftheweek.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}