Drop a Colored Pebble

Kathryn Jones

October 22, 2020

Voting, past and present: 

Drop a colored pebble

in an urn.

Use your voice:

yay or nay. 

Raise your hand.

All in favor. 

Line up over there

behind your candidate. 

Toss beans in a hat.

Write out a name;

bring your own paper. 

Drop a metal token

into a slot. 

Punch holes in a card.

Mark an “X” in a box.

Pull a lever or push a button 

on a machine.

Pencil in a bubble 

by hand on paper. 

Touch a screen 

on a computer. 

Keep your distance;

mail in a ballot. 

Wash your hands,

though it’s all sanitized. 

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 (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor 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.