Elegy for a Once-Wild Place

Kathryn Jones

May 11, 2022

The inevitable is coming;

we unknowingly brought it with us.

Did we really think we could flee

to this wild place and no one would follow?

We cannot close the gates now.

Bulldozers uproot cedar on hillsides, 

chainsaws buzz, trucks rumble

over cattle guards. Old ranch houses

crumble, while skeletons of new homes

sprout from limestone hills. 

The little goatherd and windmill 

down the road disappeared, replaced

by Black Angus, a metal shed full of hay,  

protected by a locked gate and a 

“No Trespassing” sign. 

They come with satellite dishes, 

Internet towers, King Ranch-edition trucks.

More white-tailed deer lie by the highway,

graceful necks broken. One died 

by our mailbox and bloated in the sun.

High game fences inch toward us,

tall power poles creep up the highway,

paved roads slice up the landscape. 

We are all refugees now, fleeing like deer, 

searching for a piece of the last wild place.

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.