It Is Wartime Now

New Poem.

“We have, for the first time in a number of years, become a ‘wartime’ Police Department…We will act accordingly.”
– from an NYPD internal email, Dec. 2014.

It is wartime now,
exclaims the badged blue army.
We stand up. We hear:

it is wartime now,
wartime — as if before this,
they were not at war.

It is wartime now,
as it has been for more years
than there’s been a flag.

It is wartime now.
They want to call us killers.
We will not be moved.

It is wartime now —
our weapons are the strong tongue
and the sharpened eye.

It is wartime now —
smokescreens, deceit, far flung lies;
what we say cuts through:

wartime now?  Let us
see how that differs from how
we’ve lived until now.