Aubade at the Dawn of War
Kathryn Jones
February 27, 2022
Armies swarm at the border,
tanks crawl down empty streets,
soldiers crouch in moonlight,
ready to pounce like a fox on a rabbit.
More than six thousand miles away,
I wake before dawn safe in my bed,
thinking of someone like me also lying awake,
not safe, pondering death. Will it come
in a deafening flash when the tank gun fires or
in silence when the beast devours its prey?
At first light a silver dome spreads,
not fog but smoke on the horizon.
She sits by the window, cello between her legs,
drawing the bow across strings:
“Ode to Joy,” Schiller’s poem of peace, last
movement in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
The armies do not hear, marching into morning;
she plays on, praying not with words but notes,
playing for joy and against rockets falling,
against jaws opening, against the devouring.
The same sun obscured by smoke over there
streams into my bedroom here. I arise
to brew a pot of tea, glimpse out the window
daffodils pushing through frozen ground,
defiant, taunting winter. News flashes
on the TV screen: “War begins,” but
tell the truth – war never ended.
Six thousand miles away, someone like me
still plays a cello. I hear each precious note
as sure as I hear my own voice, singing with her,
“Joyful, like a hero to victory.”
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.
