Raz, Hilda

United States, (b. 1938)

Diction

  1. “God is in the details,”
  2. I tell the kids
  3. in the public school
  4. in Milligan, Nebraska.
  5. They wonder what I mean.
  6. I tell them to look
  7. out the window
  8. at the spring fields
  9. the mud coming up
  10. just to the knee
  11. of the small pig
  12. in the far pasture.
  13. They tell me
  14. it’s not a knee
  15. but a hock
  16. and I hadn’t ought
  17. to say things I know
  18. nothing about. I say
  19. the light on the mud
  20. is pure chalcedony.
  21. They say the mud
  22. killed two cows
  23. over the weekend.
  24. I tell them the pig
  25. is alive and the spring
  26. trees are standing in a green haze.
  27. They tell me school is out
  28. in a week and they have to plant.
  29. The grain elevator at the end
  30. of Main Street stretches out
  31. her blue arms. The kids say chutes.

© Learning by Heart: Contemporary American Poetry about School.  Maggie Anderson and David Hassler, eds.. Des Moines, IA: U of Iowa Press (1999).

About the Poet:

Hilda Raz, United States, (b. 1938), is a poet, editor and educator. She has published fourteen books as a poet, nonfiction writer, and editor. She was a professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she also held a variety of editorial positions from assistant to editor-in-chief of Prairie Schooner (1970-2010).

She has served as editor, scholar, and fellow at the Breadloaf Writer’s Conference, and is a past president of Associated Writing Programs. She is the editor of several anthologies, including Living in the Margins: Women Writers on Breast Cancer (2000) and The Prairie Schooner Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Writing (1998).

Raz currently lives in New Mexico and is the Series Editor for Poetry at the University of New Mexico Press, Editor of the University of New Mexico Press Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series and Poetry Editor of bosque, a literary journal. [DES-01/22]

Additional information:

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