Fields of Sunflowers

The latest Poem of the Week is Yehuda Amichai's 'Fields of Sunflowers' :-

Fields of sunflowers, ripe and withering,

don't need the warmth of the sun anymore;

they're brown and wise already. They need

sweet shadow, the inwardness

of death, the interior of a drawer, a sack

deep as the sky. Their world to come

the innermost dark of a dark house,

the inside of a man.

Amichai was born in Wuerzburg, Germany, in 1924 and moved as a boy with his family to Palestine in 1935, eventually becoming Israel's most distinguished modern poet in Hebrew. He died in 2000.