civil war

Suzanne Morris

January 5, 2025

Civil discourse doesn’t require you to abandon your deeply held principles.  It’s a way of discussing that recognizes the dignity of the other.  –John Rose, one of the founders of the Civil Discourse Project at Duke University

we dare not speak the words

that are

dividing families into

hostile camps

we dare not speak the words

that can 

set us apart

from friends and neighbors

each side certain the other’s

truth is some distorted

version of the world

we live in

fence lines fraught

as the line between

North and South

at Richmond

we dare not speak the words

for we could not

raise them civilly, the art of

civil discourse

struck silent by

our fear that

what’s left unsaid is

all that’s saving us

from taking up the

welcome mat and

turning out the light

no we dare not

A native of Houston, Suzanne Morris has made her home in East Texas for nearly two decades.  Her poems have appeared in anthologies as well as online poetry journals, including The Texas Poetry Assignment, The New Verse News, The Pine Cone Review, and Stone Poetry Quarterly.