Vox Populi
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James Crews: After the Blizzard & Sunflower
After the Blizzard
You might be without power, sipping
cold coffee in the dark, with only
an orange to eat. But don’t the trees
each glow in their sleeves of heavy snow,
don’t you live inside a cathedral
of white limbs reaching upward, with flakes
still gathering around you like the world’s
finally paying attention? Let your thoughts,
wishes, and obligations all fall away
like the peels of this orange, revealing
every sweet section beneath. Believe
that awe will follow you from now on
wherever you go, like the snow-light
that fills these rooms, like the scent of citrus,
which passes from your hands to every
small thing you touch.
~~~~
Sunflower
“Joy is not made to be a crumb,”
Mary Oliver once wrote, but isn’t that
how it often shows up at first? One crumb
of attention, then another, and another
until you’re able to follow the trail
leading to the volunteer sunflower
you hadn’t noticed blooming by the garden.
“Volunteer,” we say, meaning no human
hand nestled that seed in the ground,
though the same could be said of joy too,
which seems to spring up out of nowhere
when you see the face of the flower
the French call tournesol, meaning
“turned toward the sun.” And don’t we
each carry a small sun in our chests
that tells us where to turn, where it’s warm,
where something bright has struggled up
out of the earth, and is now calling our name?
~~~~
Copyright 2024 James Crews. From Unlocking the Heart by James Crews (Simon & Schuster, 2024).
James Crews is the recipient of the Prairie Schooner Prize and Cowles Prize. His writing has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Ploughshares, and Sun Magazine.
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“And don’t we
each carry a small sun in our chests”–
I used to say to my kids when they were small, “Turn yourself like a sunflower to the sun and you’ll feel better.” We all carry that light.✨
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Wonderful. Hope indeed. In the tiniest of places, although Einstein showed us a la E=mc2 that nothing is ever really tiny. And there’s our girl Mary again, putting the sublime into the science of it all in tiny-seeming words.
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Both of Crews’s poems are like hymns to joy amidst the noise of life.
The orange of After the Blizzard and the Yellow of The Sunflower remind me of Van Gogh’s uses of color, especially in the series called The Sower, where the human figure is sowing seeds, renewing life, while behind him or her the brilliant sun rising is the sustaining light, spreading yellow and orange through the sky, and in one famous painting, directly over the sower’s head like a halo.
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What a beautiful description, Jim. Thank you.
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I was thankful and relieved for the balancing balm and good sense to post a link to Allen Ginsburg’s ‘Sunflower Sutra’ lest we drift like helium balloons too far astray from the realities of whole being on this embodied planet.
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Needed this so much this morning. Assuming my childhood home in Altadena is gone. Following Altadena facebook pages.
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I’m so sorry, Barbara.
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It is 39 degrees, feels like 29 this morning in our sub-tropical “clime” as William Blake would say, but I have a sunny morning in my head from reading James Crews. He is perhaps poetry’s eternal bright soul. He shall not be quenched and his art shines without end.
This sequence is perfectly timed for me!
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Reading James’s poems always makes me feel there may be hope for humanity after all.
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