Wildflower

by Megan Huwa

WILDFLOWER

You became a poem to me

when I was 13, as we

wound down and around

Ouray’s mountains. Rusted red,

yellow, and orange cairned

at the base of Million Dollar Highway—

but it was summer,

and those fallen cars

were enough to shake you loose.

Move to the middle seat, you said,

to balance the leaning car

against the steep curves.

Even then, I didn’t understand—

how, after your husband died at 35,

you drove your five children

(my mom the oldest)

from Montana’s plains

to west of the Rockies,

then eastward over the massifs

to root in Colorado’s prairie;

how life brought you low

to Prairie Smoke, plumes of feathery-red, where

heart’s attack was your watershed.

And when rain doused the land,

the bluest Columbines,

the greenest Buffalograss,

the bluest Forget-Me-Nots

bloomed through stones.

MEGAN HUWA

Megan Huwa is a poet and author of Still Life: Poetic Vignettes (Wipf & Stock, 2025). A rare health condition keeps her and her husband from living near her family’s fifth-generation Colorado farm, so her writing reaches for home, both temporal and eternal. A classically trained pianist, she melds her writing with aurality, rural life, and empathy through the varied voices and lives of those dear to her and those she observes. Follow her on Substack or Instagram.