Rhapsody in Bluebonnets

Kathryn Jones

January 31, 2022

Pebbly seeds tossed on barren ground

in the fall, trusting rain and sun to hatch

star-shaped leaves arranged in rosettes,

lying in wait all winter, cloaked in frost,

stirring with spring’s awakening, 

stretching for Gershwin’s glissando notes,

becoming the state flower, Lupinus texensis, 

cobalt blue rhapsody under cerulean sky,

florets like the miniature sunbonnets 

pioneer women wore on the way West, 

standing as high as a horse’s knees, 

waving flags of peace and serenity

in a world gone angry and 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 (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.