We left the sunflowers to fend for themselves.
We were unfit to be parents or saviors
for ourselves or the sunflowers. 

Who was the last one standing
and did you share water from paper cups
like refugees or did you know 
that no one would survive from the start?
Did you believe in God and did you
think he was the one who used the 
sun to shrink you?
Did you feel forgotten or did you feel
unloved?

When I was in third grade my teacher handed out
sunflower and pumpkin seeds at the end of June
when we stopped packing lunches and 
wore bathing suits under our school clothes.
Like all eight-year-olds I was ready
to be a mother-- a dirt-mother-- soil
mother-- wrap my arms in watering cans mother--
till and weed a splotch behind the shed-- mother
--a burying of seeds mother-- a burying of
sandals mother-- burying of babies 
mother.

My own mother was a potted basil bush
and she sat outside the back door.
She was green and always had more leaves to give but
she died every year and waited in the snow
for someone to remove her body out of reverence.

Seeds are the only joyful part
of a garden-- like nectarines and unborn babies
we can only see what we want-- 
this is how we learn what love is--
this is how eight-year-olds become mothers--
and watch their first born sunflowers die.

We went away on vacation and left my
sunflowers-- the little ladies holding parasols
and fanning themselves with the wings of 
the gypsy moths-- night lights of fireflies
they read hymnals and sang the song that
the birds taught them while they plucked 
out seeds from their thousand spider eyes. 
I did not know what a week was without water
and I drink from plastic bottles and the sunflowers 
I had grown with bags of fertilizer 
and elephant-nose watering cans 
drank from cracked earth and ant legs.
They died like they were conceived-- in 
a suffocating plastic sleeve of heat.

Did you know your mother? Your dirt mother?
Did you love your hopeful, forgetfut, dirt mother
who could not save you from the sun
or from a God who did not see mercy as rain?

I let the sun bury the sunflowers bones and the pumpkins
who survived ate the sunflowers and swelled 
like the belly of a seed or a basil plant.