Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison
When Mr. H saw the little meadow blooming
on the steel table, he bowed to the starry faces of jasmine.
This is the first flower I’ve smelled in twenty years.
And when I slid each man a bouquet in a paper cup
Mr. M said, I’ll have such a short time with these.
We spoke, then, about Beauty and Loss,
the great themes of poetry.
And when our time was done
and the guard said they had to leave the flowers,
most of the men acquiesced. But Mr. S
insisted he had, as a Native American, a right
to his rituals — sage, sweet corn, tobacco —
and no one could stop him — it was the law —
from taking these sacred plants back to his cell.
Then he raised his cup and drank
the water the flowers were drinking
and a small wind stirred in that windowless room
as we watched Mr. S. quietly bite
the heads off the Peruvian lilies,
crushing their pink sepals and the gold
inner petals flecked with maroon, swallowing
the silvery filaments, their dark
pollen-laden anthers, his mouth frothing with blossoms.
Ellen Bass’s most recent books are Indigo, (Copper Canyon, 2020), Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon, 2014), and The Human Line (Copper Canyon, 2007). Read more.
Ellen Bass, “Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison” from Indigo. Copyright © 2020 by Ellen Bass. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press, coppercanyonpress.org.