The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

—Emily Dickinson

The Sunflowers

Whoever named them must have known
somehow what only lately has been shown
to be true with telescopes and calculations:
The mass of petals arranged like solar flares
around a honeycombed interior, the seed row
swirling outward from the center ratio
shared alike by the chambers of a conch shell,
the Milky Way’s arms, and the labyrinth
of a mandala. And then, standing there
in a field, how they reveal the unsettling
truth that the sun we always believed
to be unique and ours alone is only one
of countless other stars, each pulsating, each
shedding light on a swarm of planets circling
like bees, a vision of a cosmos in which everything
is one and yet, like us, infinitely various.

— Richard Broderick