Albion Tribute To Allen Ginsberg's Sunflower Sutra Poem by Kathy Greethurst

I dawdled on the path beside a farmer's fallow field, and
sat down in the shade of a giant chestnut tree,
to watch a red kite in full flight soaring overhead, and cry.
Weatherqueen's Angel sat beside me on the scorched earth,
My best friend and I. We thought the same thoughts
of the divine, present with us, wide-eyed and potent.

A huge, steaming dung pile in the middle of the field,
sun blazing, no ghosts, no horses here, no other walkers on the path,
just ourselves, bleary-eyed and wistful like ancient travellers.

Look at the sunflower, I said. There was the shadow of a crown in silhouette against the dazzling sun. Enchanted, I rushed up. It was my first sunflower - memories of Van Gogh, Blake and Ginsberg - visions of my old life and the hell of London, squatters in cardboard boxes, broken bottles, used needles, gangsters brandishing guns and knives, screaming sirens answering emergency calls, prostitutes propositioning drunks, boarding houses stacked with bunks, chips in newspaper, broken bikes, rusty trikes, neon lights, barbed wire fences, youths smoking spliffs, and more rotters and plotters than rats, ever-present - and the golden sunflower poised in the sunlight and oblivious to the smog of Didcot's cooling towers. No longer the Cathedral of the Vale - now unholy belching and grim, polluting the pure blue sky. On the tall chimney, the Greenpeace gang has left their graffiti for all to see, ‘Blair's Legacy.'

Oh! perfect sunflower. Oh! Perfect inflorescent and present sunflower - following the direction of the sun, you grow stiff and erect - and ready to ejaculate your seeds to the four winds and create a new generation - seeds as hamster pellets with the power to procreate for a thousand years.

Oh! perfect sunflower! When did you decide you were a power station? You were never a power station. You forgot who you are. You are a beautiful sunflower - spied on by our eyes under the shade of a giant chestnut tree, part of a bright blot-on-the-landscape, parched, scorched sunshine fallow field vision.