Blog About Photography

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 Beasley

We 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.

Bill Poplack, 1982

My Grandfather, William J. Poplack, died yesterday at around 4:45 in the afternoon. He was incredibly caring and generous human being, and, at 88, he’d lost absolutely none of the wit that made him so much fun to spend time with. Grandpa stayed with us through more than 10 years of his declining health  he was also a fighter with an iron will. He survived a Nazi P.O.W. camp after his plane was shot down over occupied Holland during World War II, and then, forty years later, bested a gunshot to the heart during a mugging right here in New York City. When his time finally came, he was surrounded by family in Birmingham, MI, the place he lived all his life. Every one who knew him and was close to him will certainly miss him very much.

© Greg Wasserstrom

The other night I was on the subway with a bunch of my friends, we were on our way to the Angelika to see Persepolis (Incredible, by the way. See it!). The train was packed so we were crammed in and I was standing above a couple, probably in their late fifties, the man was wearing a heavy wool poncho. The woman had a digital camera and took a picture of the man, then they huddled together to look at the little screen. They laughed. The man said, “You can airbrush that out.” I thought to myself that that was pretty quaint that he still says airbrush, but then he corrected himself. “Photoshop it. You can Photoshop it.”

He said the words like he was handling a some novel new gadget. And then he repeated the them, only this time with a melody. He sang the them, like this:

“PHO-TO SHOP IT,” four syllables, four notes: F, F, E, D flat.

Photoshop didn’t have a jingle – until now.

The cold comes with weight.
Huge burdens of thought, rife with
triviality.

—–

Now light comes early.
A jarring reminder of
so much wasted time.

—–

Leafless and gnarled,
they make reference to what,
these icons of guilt?