War Is Here

Kathryn Jones

March 8, 2021

We think of war across oceans.

Enemies speak a foreign language,

Worship a different God,

Show contempt for democracy.

We kill and destroy them 

In the name of freedom.

Now war is here.

Enemies shout in English,

Mix Molotov cocktails with hate,

Show contempt for democracy.

They kill and destroy us

In the name of freedom.

We live in a time of uncivil war,

Of neighbor fighting neighbor,

Of lies wearing truth’s disguise, 

Of mobs chanting “USA! USA!”

While blood pools in marble halls,

In the name of freedom.

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.