Orchids in April
KATHRYN JONES
April 14, 2020
It sits on the windowsill, soaking up light.
Green leaves as thick as leather,
roots creeping out of the pot
like thin, bony fingers
searching for something to grasp.
Every spring, flower spikes shoot up,
buds swell, and the orbs burst open,
unfurling flat white petals like moth wings
and a crimson lip that juts out, begging
an insect to taste the sweetness inside.
Orchid blooms last for weeks without
much tending and so must I,
soaking up light by the window.
My bony fingers creep out of my vessel,
searching for something to grasp.
I reach out and touch the rubescent lip –
such tenderness, such fearlessness
to bloom in this world right now.
My raw heart opens and beauty holds out
her hand. With gratitude, I grasp it.
KATHRYN JONES is a longtime journalist, essayist, author, and teacher. A regular contributor to The New York Times and a contributing editor and former writer-at-large for Texas Monthly magazine, her essays have been published in Texas Monthly and in two anthologies, A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, (University Press of Kentucky, 2019), and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016 ). She currently teaches journalism at Tarleton State University and is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor (The Last Picture Show, The Wild Bunch) and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.
