To Donald Trump Regarding the Border Wall and Why I’m Not Voting for You or Paying for It

Kathryn Jones

October 14, 2020

The border is not

a line drawn on a map,

a river to swim across,

a wall to climb or tunnel under,

a fence to cut and tear down, 

a boundary to keep people out,

a boundary to keep people in,

a political bargaining chip,

a militarized zone,

a hole to repair,

broken and needs to be “fixed.”

I crossed the border 

at Laredo on a bridge of steel, 

at Los Ebanos on a ferry pulled by rope,

on foot at Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend,

in a boat rowed by an old man at Boquillas, 

in the sand at Boca Chica where the Rio Grande

spills into the Gulf of Mexico,

in a plane on the way to Monterrey,

with and without a passport,

when no one cared that I did or asked me why,

in my mind, which cannot be contained, 

many times and am richer for it. 

The border is 

where countries and cultures overlap,

land interwoven like a tight wool rug,

people intertwined, fingers interlaced,

the seam that holds the fabric together,

a plate of steaming food for the body and the soul,

a trove of history, of conquerors and those

 who would not be conquered,

blood flowing through time and soaked into soil,

a state of mind, a way of life, 

a mystery, an enigma,

boundless and borderless.

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.