Conclusion: Why Didst Thou Leave Thy Body Here?

When we have come full circle through both CSA and USA soldier’s letters and diaries we realize that slavery was one thing that both sides had fought for. It is simply irrefutable. The Civil War veterans’ later “consensus, which some voiced openly: Confederates soldiers had not fought for slavery; Union soldiers had not fought for its abolition” (68) is curious, but it is only curious as a study in the psychology of either denial or amnesia. The veterans’ own words, letters, and diaries, written in the heat of battle, preclude their later attempts to minimize slavery and demonstrated without question that black slavery was an issue for which both sides had fought and died. That is not to say it was the only reason, or that every soldier shared it, or that it was constant across times or location, or that written affidavits could be secured on every day of the war with Union soldiers vowing that they were fighting against slavery and Confederates vowing that they were fighting for it. Still, as much as there was any reason to fight, slavery was a reason. For some it was bigger, for some it was less, for some it grew, for some it shrank. But at the end of the day, at the end of the fight, and at the end of the war any honest grave digger on a blood stained field of that most terrible conflict would have told you plainly and truly that the men he now interred hadn’t come here because then liked brass buttons. He’d tell you they hadn’t been trained to kill, and done it, because they thought it was because they liked the sight of blood sodden ground and half crushed humans. And he would tell you that their crumpled rotting corpses weren’t laying in the sun today because they hadn’t stopped to think about the reasons why they fought. No, that grave digger, that most necessary tiller of the soil, could have looked into your eyes and told you that these dead men had reasons that brought then here to leave their bodies. He could have told, and he would have, that the reasons were many, and complex, and different from time to time. But he also could have told you that slavery was a reason why they fought, for these dead men had, through their letters, said so themselves. And as McPherson has shown, that grave digger, that veiler of human life, would have been right.

Board of plenty

You have laid the table well
For those who would feast on sorrows.

You have given trials richly
To those You know must grow.

Yet must this be so?
Can only throught the pain,
So very like the pains of death
The gift of wisdsom find its rest?

I am not weak, and bitterness
In me finds little consolation
That it should live or grow
Near to my chest.

Yet even so, I find the
Call to suffer and to suffer well
More cryptic than all the twists of
Gordium. Shall I rest?

I do not think that rest was made for you.
Much wisdom is your stock
And wisdom brings its sweetness and its pain.
Endure and learn.

With time, you shall, I think, find hope
To rise again.

The Arcs of God

These thinned, gossamer threads
Of time, flesh, existence, essence
Are what gifts we have from Hands
Which give, and give, yet never change.

They are lines. Gently they curve.
Space is their element, hope their breath.
They are strung from the stars of heaven.
They drape with the grace of beauty.

These soft arcs, yours and mine,
Are for each other close,
And seem by those same Hands
Meet for some congruence.

And touching once they part, tangential.
Space and time and dreams shall move between.

When alone in drafty halls think not of Richard on his Throne

Historical study is a fearful thing these days. The halls of history, I would argue, have become immensely drafty in the past 100 years. The study has been minimized, quantified, qualified, identified, contained, boxed, and sealed into riduculously small and handy packages, the only trouble being, and curiously this never occured to any of its perpetrators, that these package do not, and cannot serve the slightest possible practical purpose in all the world of humanity.
Not practical, now how can this be? Certainly, gender studies, sociological insights, and race relation research is emminently practical, is it not? Perhaps, and again, perhaps not. The trouble with all this is simply that history has lost all status as an interpretive metanarrative, thus it has devovled simply to a discipline much as electrical enginnering or psychology. History can no longer tell the non-specialist anything useful or prescriptive. It is in many ways a sealed volume.

Reflect now upon the days thou once were given

To thee we are not given. Yet, if so be it, could the squiggle of our narrow lives, or the then annelidous turnings of unremembered hours, joys, fears, and variegated emotions, affections, dusky dreams, could they all birth something truly full of wonder? Could they struggle to conform the disenchanted pieces of forgotten quests with the new born visions of connected passions? These are the questions. To us they are given, ripe, with that small, fruit-borne smile that quaintly, sweetly says, "journey far, suffer much, but find...find in the journey itself joy enough to slake the thirst that only such a journey may inspire." The smile is not in vain. The curve upon the lips is real. The vision flickers low, but questions may beget, and offspring, not in vain, shall, with grace and time, populate my tortuous hearth.

What stones shall witness

Dead men gather too in other Lands. And there, I think, they must, as ours, Consider issues weighty with Significance.

There too when light and noise shall Split, and heaven crash, the pocked earth Shall give. And when that moment comes Who can say what stones shall witness?

Love, be strewn

Fearless grace is no excuse
To fight, to scramble in abuse.

Hope alone is not enough
If with it is all rebuff.

Care, concern, can both go wild,
And devastate the meekest child.

Yet love, I think, is quite immune
So let your life with it be strewn.

And then, when to your fathers gathered
You, with praise, shall be quite slathered.

Hoard not.

When shed abroad,
Grace is sufficient
To challenged
Weakened hearts,
Renew minds
Once recumbent.

Then gather not.
Hoard not.
Only let to flow
That flowing
May renew. For,
Grace is sufficient.

Glastonbury

Stones do not reflect on branch of thorn descendent.
Voices echo not where lines are fallen.
Hope lies scattered 'neath matted flags.

Staff of mourners give not freedom to partake.

Yet that descent is not echoless entire.

And blades, though woven, shall permit to pass.

Imperfect/conditional

If I died but imperfectly
Would that be conditional?

Or if, in the present, my life should ebb
Would my sleep be present, future
Or imperative?

These are the questions most fitting,
But ask them not of me, for
My knowledge is weak.
A croque-mort francais,
He would know.

Hope, Peace, Vision

Hope can endure
Peace can sustain
Vision can preserve

But what can cleanse Vison clouded by frozen tears?
Or Peace corrupted by the questions of humanity?
Or Hope once lost in the embrace of darkened fields?

There the birds' sweet questionings are silent.
There the Vision gathers Peacefully, embedded with the only Hope it has ever known.
There nothing shakes,
and unperturbed
we sleep, all silent.

Hope, I had a vison,
And gathered with you there,
I saw a thousand crystals
Meeting in the air.

Had I known but sooner
What weight can shower down,
Those crystals I'd much rather
Bury in my crown.

Stones of witness

One wonders about things sometimes. Like what exactly the people who erected Stonehenge were thinking. Alas, we from them are far too removed, we can only guess. So guess we do.

The man offers

Feeble stones

Before the sun

they are still

And small

And yet they rest

Alert

Several more fleeting minutes and we are headed to England. I wonder what I shall find there? Shall I find what I have imagined? Or shall I find something very different? We shall see.

Autumn

Never forget that you, as a creature, are part of something very beautiful.

When I consider the heavens

Looking to the stars it a habit that we all should practice. As Nathaniel Bowditch's mother once told him (or so the story goes roughtly remembered) 'looking up at the stars shrinks our own troubles down to size'

Start at the beginning