Antietam

As the sun rises

soldiers stifle breath

Fog encloses

a church hiding sharpshooters

Under the sun’s glare

three-thousand fall in twenty minutes

At noon

dead lie “like the ties of a railroad”

As the sun lowers

over twenty-thousand groan or speak no more

At night

men stare into the fire-

yet another force which destroys with little warning, no regret

So, this is war, they think,

if they hadn’t thought so before

Gettysburg

“We cannot consecrate this ground.”

But we try:

a thousand statues sculpted

by the most skilled men in our age,

a dozen glass cases with the weapons,

a guided tour of the grounds

where fifty-thousand men died.

Fifty-thousand.

In three days.

In this small space.

Bodies must have been stacked

like decks of cards

on roads where we’re now bumper to bumper.

Maybe through our presence

in recognition of their absence

we’ll see the atrocities of war.

But probably not.

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