A Poem on Civil War Pilgrimage
I didn’t get to Antietam on this particular tour of Civil War related landmarks, but this poem by Sandra Beasley posted on smut to-go kind of captures the experience of visiting some of these places, distant from us in both miles and time. If most people take in a Civil War battlefield at all, I think they probably do it on a school field trip without feeling much of a connection to what they’re seeing. This captures that experience as well.
Antietam
by Sandra BeasleyWe all went in a yellow school bus,
on a Tuesday. We sang the whole way up.
We tried to picture the bodies stacked three deep
on either side of that zigzag fence.
We tried to picture 23,000 of anything.
It wasn’t that pretty. The dirt smelled like cats.
Nobody knew who the statues were. Where was
Stonewall Jackson? We wanted Stonewall on his horse.
The old cannons were puny. We asked about fireworks.
Our guide said that sometimes, the land still let go
of fragments from the war — a gold button, a bullet,
a tooth migrating to the surface. We searched around.
On the way back to the bus, a boy tripped me and I fell—
skidding hard along the ground, gravel lodging
in the skin of my palms. I cried the whole way home.
After a week, the rocks were gone.
My mother said our bodies could digest anything,
but that’s a lie. Sometimes, at night, I feel
the battlefield moving inside of me.