Color Me Red

Kathryn Jones

September 17, 2023

In this gray world I need more red:

A Northern Cardinal trilling from an oak tree branch

Don Juan roses climbing a wrought iron trellis 

Roma tomatoes swelling on tangled green vines 

Grapefruit dangling like rubies in the Rio Grande Valley

A Summer Tanager flitting in the Davis Mountains

Texas Star Hibiscus blooming on my patio

Ruby-throated hummingbirds probing honeysuckle

Watermelon flesh dripping with summer sweetness

Striped cliffs celebrating a Caprock Canyon sunset

Ocotillo flaming after Big Bend rains

Muddy water flowing down the Rio Rojo

Blood of South Texas ancestors beating in my heart

Coloring my state, my being red, so red

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the 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. Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.