Today’s Throwback Thursday selection is Hilda Raz’s “From Your Mouth to God’s Ear” from her 1997 collection, Divine Honors—the winner of the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry in 2002.
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From Your Mouth to God’s Ear
Off the cliff, into air, the mother shout
blackberry-jam thick, stirred down
into a soothing lick on the needle-pricked
thumb, from God’s mouth to your ear:
Stay out! The clouds won’t, that’s for sure:
the rabbit, no voice and frozen on the lawn,
won’t for long. And you’ll have nothing to say
again, as usual. For sure.
Wasn’t that old story about a man spinning
straw into gold a lie? Oh? He did it for a girl.
HILDA RAZ is the author of five poetry books, most recently All Odd and Splendid (Wesleyan, 2008). She has also edited five books of poetry, essays, and fiction. She co-authored, with her son Aaron Raz Link, the memoir What Becomes You. Her work has been published in journals and magazines including The Women’s Review of Books, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, and Southern Review; and anthologized in such volumes as 75 Poems On Retirement, the Poets Book of Days, and the Anthology of Contemporary American Women Poets. She is the Glenna Luschei Endowed Editor-in-Chief of Prairie Schooner, a literary quarterly that has been in continuous publication since 1927, as well as a professor in the English Department at the University of Nebraska.
