Ode to a Sunflower

Kathryn Jones

March 27, 2022

This is how you began – 

stardust fallen to Earth

becomes black seeds buried,

waiting for rain, warmth, rebirth;

prickly stalk reaching skyward, 

unbending; flower a tiny sun 

awakening, following her mother 

as she journeys from east to west, 

vanishing below the horizon.

You are the daughter of stars,

brown-eyed, yellow-haired goddess, 

eye-dazzling against blue sky;

Helios Anthos, symbol of loyalty,

longevity, adoration. You endure

heat and drought but open yourself

to beauty. Even as invaders attack, 

trying to pry you from the land,  

you stand tall, roots clinging to soil.

Light reveals you are not one flower

but many, tiny florets surrounded

by golden petals like sun rays, 

seeds arranged in Fibonacci spirals, 

portrait of nature’s perfection. 

You defeat invaders by never dying,

your seed carried by birds or wind, 

gilding fields, meadows, hillsides, 

beginning anew, following the sun.

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 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