To My Father’s Orchids

Kathryn Jones

January 29, 2023

Tell me, 

please tell me what he did

to make you bloom,

to convince you to send up a flower spike, 

to open your buds and reveal such splendor,

to make your roots crawl out of their pots,

to dangle like fingers reaching for the light.

Whisper the secrets you told him about beauty

so he never lost faith you would bloom again.

Turn your faces to me – some flat, some with a ruffled lip, 

some with fringed petals, some striped, some spotted –

tell me how you all came to thrive in this place

and bloom – bloom! – for him but not for me.

You do not have any choice now, do you understand? 

He is gone and not coming back, your caretaker, your god. 

He left all of you to me, despite – perhaps because of –

my shortcomings, so I would have something to tend.

Now your fleshy green leaves sag – are you grieving as I am? 

Take heart that he loved you like children,

showered on you his time and energy and devotion. 

Now I really need to know: What makes you bloom?

Can you please, please, please 

tell me?

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.