The Sunflower Sutra-Allen Ginsberg

[00:00.000] 作曲 : Ginsberg [00:08.501] [00:10.853] I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock [00:13.649] and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific [00:17.743] locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry. [00:22.508] Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, [00:27.877] we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, [00:32.816] surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery. [00:37.488] The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, [00:44.453] no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, [00:48.682] just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily. [00:56.501] Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, [01:01.260] big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust— [01:05.760] —I rushed up enchanted—it was my first sunflower, [01:09.468] memories of Blake—my visions—Harlem [01:12.641] and Hells of the Eastern rivers, [01:14.774] bridges clanking Joes Greasy Sandwiches, [01:17.735] dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, [01:22.623] the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, [01:28.524] only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past— [01:33.572] and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, [01:36.612] crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye— [01:42.696] corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, [01:47.267] seeds fallen out of its face, [01:49.840] soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, [01:52.893] sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb, [01:57.552] leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, [02:00.690] gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, [02:06.201] a dead fly in its ear, [02:08.252] Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, [02:13.361] I loved you then! [02:15.772] The grime was no man’s grime but death and human locomotives, [02:20.138] all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, [02:24.734] that smog of cheek, [02:26.445] that eyelid of black mis’ry, [02:28.856] that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt— [02:33.071] industrial—modern—all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown— [02:39.406] and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, [02:45.042] in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, [02:50.963] the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, [02:54.161] the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, [02:57.842] what more could I name, [02:59.417] the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, [03:02.087] the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, [03:05.535] wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos—all these [03:08.316] entangled in your mummied roots—and you there standing before me in the sunset, [03:11.697] all your glory in your form! [03:14.237] A perfect beauty of a sunflower! [03:16.729] a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! [03:19.508] a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, [03:23.037] woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze! [03:29.903] How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, [03:32.936] while you cursed the heavens of the railroad and your flower soul? [03:37.271] Poor dead flower? [03:38.990] when did you forget you were a flower? [03:42.302] when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? [03:46.811] the ghost of a locomotive? [03:48.565] the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive? [03:53.101] You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower! [03:57.029] And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not! [04:02.133] So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter, [04:07.830] and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack’s soul too, and anyone who’ll listen, [04:13.732] —We’re not our skin of grime, [04:16.002] we’re not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, [04:19.502] we’re golden sunflowers inside, [04:22.288] blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies [04:26.974] growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, [04:31.016] spied on by our own eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision. [04:40.949] Berkeley, 1955