M. Frost
moon passing over the face of a sunflower
…………..sunflowers don’t turn to the moon
…………..– Tanya Tagaq (“Ikualajut”)
ripened
the sunflower
sets seed a broken orb
oiled to gloss by a palm of sun
kissed by a creeping edge of darkness
gleaming terrestrial skin pressed into night
what is the face of a sunflower but a brilliant corona
heavenly gaze a periodic burden of light
relieved by kisses of darkness
shadows of the moon
seed-orb setting
the sunflower
ripened
_______________
The creative work of M. Frost appears in Abyss & Apex, as well as Star*Line, SpecPoVerse, Strange Horizons, Orion’s Belt, Dreams & Nightmares and many others, with poetry chapbooks Cow Poetry (Finishing Line Press, 2006), Constellation (CreateSpace, 2013), The Women of Myth (Island of Wak-Wak, 2025), and The March (The Arcanist, forthcoming). Explore more at mfrostwords.com and follow @mfrostwords.bsky.social.
Author’s Backstory/Crafting Elements: Genesis of the poem: Tanya Tagaq’s album Saputjiji is beautiful and brutal. On the sixth track, Ikualajut, she sings “A collective shift of consciousness is needed / So the sunflowers will all turn towards the sun…Because sunflowers don’t turn to the moon.” The first few times I heard the song, I was thinking about the residential school system, the penumbra of generational trauma, the salted soil of colonization.
Late one night, deep in the album again, I started thinking instead about the sunflower. About the journey from seed to flower to setting seed, rotations of day and night, plant cycles and astronomical ones.
Sunflowers don’t turn to the moon. I don’t know if Tanya Tagaq meant that the moon is not bright enough to turn the head of a flower. But just as the moon can be a light in the dark, it also can be a darkness in the light, casting a long shadow during a solar eclipse.
This is a mirror poem as homage to the parallel stages of the eclipse, a musical ekphrasis celebrating the creation of beauty while bearing witness to darkness.
The image “Sun and Moon” is a blend of two photographs I took years apart: a volunteer sunflower that surprised me in a container pot, and a partial solar eclipse taken from nearly the same spot. I was remembering that sunflower and that solar eclipse when I penned the poem. If the two had been paired in time, would the sunflower have turned its head under the gaze of the moon?
Editor’s Comments/Image Credit: “Ikualajut” by Inuk artist Tanya Tagaq is a striking blend of experimental, avant-garde, and industrial music. At its core, the track is driven by a solo, highly stylized version of traditional Inuit throat singing (katajjaq), overlaid with dark, ominous electronic marches and ambient bass. The piece reference in the poem is an interesting performance piece heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=865W_z3EnBI
Image credit: As described above, the image is a super-positioning of two photographs taken by the author. However, I tweaked the lighting for better resolution.