Poetry |

“April 9th, 1965, Appomattox”

April 9TH, 1965, Appomattox

 

I attended the centennial ceremony

of the Civil War’s armistice in Appo-

mattox, Va. on April 9th, nineteen

sixty five when I was eleven years old.

There were over 20,000 people

there, many of whom were digging up

Minié balls from the battlefield outside

of town, then selling them as souvenirs.

The grandsons of Grant and Lee were there

along with the Marine Band on a stage

festooned in red, white, and blue not far

from the courthouse where Grant and Lee

put an end to that most dread American

war.

         I lived not far away in Lynchburg

where my friends identified me as “Yankee”

since I was born in the north and had lived there

for a while, which might as well have been a century

to them since that was where I was from.

We played “war” — a game in which the uni-

forms of my soldiers were Union blue and theirs

Confederate gray.

                  We re-enacted battles

in the way young boys do, especially

Gettysburg where more than fifty thousand

casualties occurred — not enough room

on our floor to accommodate that number

with our plastic troops, so we resurrected

the dead until we couldn’t count anymore.

We “played” like this because of what so many

Southerners preferred to call that war,

which I will not repeat since calling it that

only serves to open its wound that’s still

so thinly sealed and which our child’s play

with plastic men both failed and succeeded in

burying it for a while, the horror and mayhem

of Vicksburg, Manassas, Antietam, Bull Run,

Shiloh, Chancellorsville, The Wilderness,

Cold Harbor, Gettysburg, the last

of which and bloodiest of all occurred

in early July, 1865

and which Abraham Lincoln on

his way to the site composed an address in only

fifteen minutes or so to those who were left

to observe the charnel ground: “We cannot ded-

icate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot

hallow – this ground. The brave men, living

and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated

it, far above our poor power to add

or detract. The world will little note nor long

remember what we say here, but it

can never forget what they did here.”

It wasn’t until that day in Appomattox

in 1965 when I observed

those scions of Grant and Lee on a makeshift stage

shaking hands as their grandfathers had

a hundred years ago that I felt the blood

in the dirt of that town and its surrounding fields

rise up in me like a flower and blossom in grief.

Contributor
Chard deNiord

Chard deNiord’s most recent poetry collection is In My Unknowing (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). He recently retired from teaching at Providence College and was the Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015-19).

Posted in Poetry

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