A little over a year ago I first encountered a poem by Marie Howe, “Annunciation.”
Even if I don’t see it again—nor ever feel it
I know it is—and that if once it hailed me
it ever does—And so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as toward a place, but it was a tilting
within myself,as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where
it isn’t—I was blinded like that—and swam
in what shone at meonly able to endure it by being no one and so
specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.
Before blooming, when the flowers are just beginning to bud, young sunflowers track the movement of the sun. The plant heads—sap-green, spiky, lion-maned— tilt toward the sun at dawn, following its path across the sky, reorienting eastward at night to prepare for the sun’s arrival the next day. As the sunflower gradually opens, revealing its tightly furled petals, the flower head continues to track across the sky, receiving the light and warmth of the sun, until it has completely bloomed, displaying that familiar fanfare of yellow petals. Fully opened sunflowers do not move but face east, positioned to receive the first hours of morning sunlight, which also helps to attract pollinators, like hummingbirds and native bees.
The sunflower, Helianthus spp., turns not with its whole body but with its stem, growth hormones increasing on either side of the flower head in response to sun exposure. This means that as the plant grows taller it is the growth itself that makes it change direction. Like eyes scanning a page, it moves back and forth, its shaggy head following the sun, which it knows without knowing to follow.