Wildflowers

By Reginald Gibbons b. 1947 Reginald Gibbons

Coleridge carefully wrote down a whole page

of them, all beginning with the letter b.

Guidebooks preserve our knowledge

of their hues and shapes, their breeding.

Many poems have made delicate word-chimes—

like wind-chimes not for wind but for the breath of man—

out of their lovely names.

At the edge of the prairie in a cabin

when thunder comes closer to thump the roof hard

a few of them—in a corner, brittle in a dry jar

where a woman’s thoughtful hand left them to fade—

seem to blow with the announcing winds outside

as the rain begins to fall on all their supple kin

of all colors, under a sky of one color, or none.

Source: Saints (Persea Books, 1986)

Biography

Born and raised in Houston, Reginald Gibbons earned his BA in Spanish and Portuguese from Princeton University, and both his MA in English and creative writing and his PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.

Gibbons is the author of more than half a dozen collections of poetry, including Sparrow: New and Selected Poems (1997), winner of the Balcones Poetry Prize, and Creatures of a Day (2008), finalist for the . . .

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