28 Feb 2025

Corinna
Board

New
Moon

Mar 14th

Feb 12th

Red Hills
with Flowers

After Georgia O’Keeffe

I don’t want to talk about the flowers.

Instead, I’ll tell you how the dunes

were the colour of blood

oranges, how it could have been

another planet. Think Mars –

its empty acres of crimson dust,

an uneasiness that settles in the lungs

and makes it hard to breathe.

There are no flowers on Mars.

Flowers like sunsets or sunrises,

freshly cut, red as wounds.

I could tell you that we walked

for miles, that the heat was

like nothing I’d known, but you

will still ask about the flowers;

angry little flames, livid with scent.

Yes, the flowers, you’ll say. Tell me how

they got there; how did they ever grow?

Behind the poem...

In Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, it’s hard to ignore the flowers – especially in Red Hills with Flowers. And though the speaker in my poem appears repelled by them, they remain omnipresent. The strange and beautiful landscape depicted by O’Keeffe in shades of orange, red and ochre becomes the backdrop for a hidden story, in which the brightly coloured flowers convey a sense of menace and foreboding.