Welcome to Dystopia
Kathryn Jones
September 22, 2024
Utopia lives
in a town surrounded by a paradise
of hills along the Sabinal River.
Utopia tried to live
in a French-Belgian-Swiss colony,
La Réunion, along the Trinity;
in Post at the foot of the Panhandle
where a cereal king envisioned
a model town, an agrarian paradise
until it wouldn’t rain anymore and
the railroad wouldn’t stop at utopia.
Dystopia lives
in the Texas hills, along rivers,
in the east and the west.
Ancient Greek for “bad place,”
this dystopia is not imagined,
like Huxley’s Brave New World.
Look at the evidence:
wild places ruined by greed;
climate change, pollution;
technology controlled by monster corporations;
the specter of AI; government oppression
imposing fear, dehumanizing lives.
Dystopia lives
along the border in wretched camps,
families still searching for their separated children;
in the trickery of those who want to banish
refugees seeking asylum, putting them on planes
from Texas to Cape Cod and Chicago;
in the Texas Capitol, where the corrupt are not held accountable,
the poor punished for being poor and powerless;
in the slums of cities, homeless ignored on dirty streets;
in the minds of people who believe what they want to hear,
ignoring evidence, denying truth.
It is neither a brave nor a new world
but the cowardly same old story,
the folly of history repeating itself
while a dead child floats in the Rio Grande
because he believed in a paradise across the river,
a state called Texas that meant “friends,”
a place that was supposed to give him a better life.
Kathryn Jones is a poet, journalist, and essayist whose work has been published in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, Texas Highways, and the Texas Observer. Her poetry has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including TexasPoetryAssignment.com, Unknotting the Line: The Poetry in Prose (Dos Gatos Press, 2023), Lone Star Poetry (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2023), and in her chapbook, An Orchid’s Guide to Life, published by Finishing Line Press. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016 and lives on a ranch near Glen Rose, Texas.
