Rage for Uvalde
Kathryn Jones
May 26, 2022
Do not let this one pass –
mutilated bodies lying still
on the classroom floor
while you, safe in your house,
tuck your children into bed tonight.
Do not wake up and watch
the news on TV, thinking
it cannot happen here.
It happened in their “here”
while you went about your day.
Do not pray for Uvalde’s parents;
they do not need your prayers,
they need your anger, your resolve
while you post your kids’ pictures
of their last day of school on Facebook.
Do not cry for Uvalde’s dead;
they do not need your tears.
They need your rage against politicians
who smile while they take blood money,
then put on sad faces for the cameras.
Do not pretend you are concerned
when you do nothing because you think
nothing can be done. The next shooter
is loading ammo and looking at maps
while you drive your children to school.
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 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.
