Gettysburg, Redux
[Note: this poem was inspired by a strange and terrible experience I had at 17 when I first set foot on the battlefield in 1965 after an interview at the college there: physiologically, it was like being mortally wounded. I was an agnostic then and so shrugged it off, but after I had an NDE 7 years later, I started thinking it may have been something else.]
Now the happy soldiers
go to fight again the battle,
marching bravely forty abreast
with heavy muskets shouldered,
yelling their cries of pain and glory
as they face the cold cannon
barking like a pack of mad dogs.
Down they go in ones and twos,
and sometimes in little bunches,
collapsing together as though
put to sleep by the fairy dust
of long forgotten dreams.
Both sides feel the urge
to kill, to step the victor
o'er their bothers' bones.
Grown men playing-- yes,
even perhaps a bit silly--
but maybe, just maybe,
some of them are unaware
of their own anguished deaths
there on that sweating day
not really so very long ago.
At seventeen I went to that town
to talk of my education and
in the warm afternoon
I meandered mindlessly
amidst the boulders named
fearfully for Satan's lair.
There, suddenly, terribly,
while walking between two
of the giant stones, my body
shuddered in anguish and sweat,
my heart raced like it might burst,
as fearful dread seized my mind
and rattled me to the very core
of my soul; but back then, I did not
yet know I might have lived before.
['Satan's lair' refers to Devil's Den, near the base of the Little Round Top where some of the battle's fiercest fighting took place.]
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