Tuesday, January 1, 2013

Poet’s Corner- On The 150th Anniversary Of The Emancipation Proclamation-“We Are Coming Father Abraham 200, 000 Strong”-Robert Lowell’s “For The Union Death” -





… “make way, make way, give way, the Massachusetts 54th Honor Guard is coming through, make way,” yelled a grizzled veteran, a grizzled veteran of his generation’s  own unloved war who had turned a strange corner for peace as he waited to form up to march on Armistice Day 2012 with the brethren against maddened war news, and talk of war. His mind swirled back not to unloved war fights and streets fights against war but to what meant his automatic call of a moment before at the sight of that honor guard.

Thoughts of long gone snickers and barbs in Richmond town (and not just Richmond town but cotton greedy commercial whigs of Boston, those who spoke only to Cabots and to god) when Andrews declared for a regiment (and Lincoln, hell, old cracker Lincoln to hear it told, called for chain break), snicker thoughts that three-fifth of a man, hah, are you kidding, would not, could not (lacking manly presence, and stinking to high heaven of humid, moist bellum cotton suns) fight to break chains to recover that missing two-fifth, thoughts of  rebel snicker that no white johnnie from some desolate Ohio River town or farm for love nor money would move one foot, move one inch, to break those chains, thoughts too of manly courage (nervous, hell, yes, nervous as every man is before bullet fights, jesus, what do you think ) before Wagner front, and tear-eyed thoughts of Captain Brown and his band of brothers before hellish Harpers Ferry fight, no rebel snickers that night.            

And thoughts too of still lonely Shiloh graveyards (or you name your hundred graveyards) solid blue bled in a grey land, a foreign grey land,  simple gravestones, maybe a hasty wooden cross when the dead piled up too high, names now getting harder to read for ancient eyes, and forgetful minds, thoughts of childhood postage stamps commemorations of such and such Grand Army of the Republic encampment, and then none, as time took its toll, thoughts of sturdy yeoman southern mountain men, kindred, who fought for the union, fought for Mister Lincoln, if not for his nigras, thoughts too of  stirring sights at Memorial Hall of scented wood-etched names , some class years decimated, of Harvard union fallen in the hundred battlefield graveyards, but thoughts too, immense thoughts, back to that childhood time desecrated statehouse Saint Gaudens relief and proud men, proud union men marching to hell, or glory.

Yah, some things are worth fighting for, and as his finished his thoughts and readied himself to march one more time against the monsters of war he wished, wished to high heaven, that his war, his unloved war, could have produced anything but cold black marble down in D.C. …               
For the Union Dead

Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the crowded, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is a lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his 'niggers.'

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the 'Rock of Ages'
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

Robert Lowell

 

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