Us and Flowers

By Hilda Raz | From Prairie Schooner – Winter 2025

Explore: Poetry

A day for atonement again.
Three months ago, Blackfeet Daisies and Apache Plumes lined the road.
In your garden Tidy Tips, their flowers white & gold fingerprints.

Last night I read that C/2023A3, or Atlas, or Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas
moves away from Earth in orbit around our sun
every eighty thousand years.
Tonight near us, it is bright with a tail.

“Pretend,” says a mother to her son,
“that Trouble is changed as clay can be
into a huge bull (you know we’ve
got to dispose of it, a ritual matter
involving blades and blood).

“The bull is about to charge. We have
only this bright shawl with fringes
around our shoulders. What must we do?”

I think that G-d tells us to step aside and twirl as we raise the shawl. Doesn’t G-d?

Hilda Raz is the editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series, University of New Mexico Press, and copublisher and poetry editor of ABQ inPrint. Her most recent book is Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems (University of Nebraska Press). She lives in Placitas, New Mexico, with Dale Nordyke.