Breakfast Poems

Dear Colonel Chamberlain,

It's abiding-
The something.
What they
Did here,
Abides.
It live on in the swells of
The contoured land
That rounds and falls
With a living breath,
It moves to the echo
Of the beating drum
And persistent footsteps
Of the brave men
And boys,
[Even the movement
from a past embrace of
The german brothers,
(two sides, one dead)
Or the girl baking bread
For union soldiers
(bullet through the kitchen window,
shot and killed)
Or the 1,0000 surgeons
Methodically amputating
limbs,
and lives
(7,000 shots
In just 3 days
With unprotected lead
Swimming through the
Bones)].

(My dreams grew violent,
In the abiding wake.
Three perfectly straight
Liquid red lines appeared
Across my stomach;
I swam in an invitingly cold river
To find my skin
The battlefield of clamped sea creatures;
An afternoon nap above the turmoil
Was interrupted by previously peaceful men
Now with talons longer than my arms
Climbing the wall outside my window
To avenge my mistakes.)
Ugly thoughts rising from their noble actions,
When all I want to write is the beauty and the heart and the tragedy.

It was real those days, though.
When Pickett charged,
It was not capital "N" North and
Capital "S" South,
or a noted and remembered address
testing the conception of
an ideal,
or state rights fighting human rights,
or even slavery:
It was a group of young
Men, in an open field
(no trees, no walls, no stones)
One by one
Shot,
Until collapsed knees
Beckoned the bodies back to the Earth,
Back to dust.

We can paint them as
Lilacs, drum taps, lightning strikes
Until their faces dissolve in metaphor,
(steady footsteps in the morning rain
revealed an immortalized battallion
with the blood in my own veins
and a name lines from mine
on an de-randomizing tree
somehow connecting us through
time and love.
But is it unfair to feel the loss
any more so than the others?)
Knowing them all
Simply as men, though
Puts a weight on my heart,
And a knot in my throat.

DLS