September 18, 1862
In the sky above the fire, bats swirl through wifting smoke.
Shoeless, the boy sits alone, fingering a book,
small, leather-bound, closed with dirty twine,
the last memory of his brother.
His dog, a roan-flanked hound,
attached in Virgina as his own camp
follower,
sniffs along the edges of the fire.
A gnarled crumb of biscuit, hard and rancid, is theirs to share.
In a year of fighting, digging, marching back and forth,
he has come to expect
horror, smoke, the echoing whistle of grapeshot,
the scream and stink of dying men, the shattering of silence.
But Sharpsburg is the worst he has ever seen.
In a year of war he has never seen so clearly
how battle ground the day into shards of broken men
and horses left torn and screaming in the fields.
Federal guns mowed a cornfield, taller than a man, until
the crippled stalks stood no higher than the
soldiers dead among the rows.
Yet he knows that blackbirds hide throughout the forest,
waiting out the human folly,
that sunlight still flashes
from the steeple of the
church in town,
and he imagines running away and
finding a girl who would
love him
despite the dreams.
April 2009, RTP
