Prophecy

In Colorado, they are illegal to pluck.
Colorado citizens must “protect them
from needless destruction.”
It’s a flower that can subsist
for a while, then it fades away.
But one of its seedlings will persist
somewhere in the garden.

James Tate published the poem
“Why I Will Not Get out of Bed”
in 1967. The sense of these lines
was entirely altered every time
I read them after 1999:
“I see children running

through columbine…”

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Angie Mazakis’s book, I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First, was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by The Boston Globe. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Columbia Journal, Black Warrior Review, Mizna, and Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry. She was named a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow and is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.