I often read poems about war these days, maybe to figure out how to live with its horror. This poem is by Jane Kenyon, who was born in Ann Arbor and earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Michigan.
Married to the past U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall, she died of leukemia in April 1995. The wars in this gentle poem are long past. What's left are only museum items, a novel and the huge question of the third stanza:
At the Public Market Museum: Charleston, South Carolina
A volunteer, a Daughter of the Confederacy,
receives my admission and points the way.
Here are gray jackets with holes in them,
red sashes with individual flourishes,
things soft as flesh. Someone sewed
the gold silk cord onto that gray sleeve
as if embellishments
could keep a man alive.
I have been reading War and Peace,
and so the particulars of combat
are on my mind -- the shouts and groans
of men and boys, and the horses' cries
as they fall, astonished at what
has happened to them.
Blood on leaves,
blood on grass, on snow; extravagant
beauty of red. Smoke, dust of disturbed
earth; parch and burn.
Who would choose this for himself?
And yet the terrible machinery
waited in place. With psalters
in their breast pockets, and gloves
knitted by their sisters and sweethearts,
the men in gray hurled themselves
out of the trenches, and rushed against
blue. It was what both sides
agreed to do.
-- From Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon, Graywolf Press, 1996
Fleda Brown, of Traverse City, is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. Learn more about her on her Web site, fledabrown.com. She's writing each Sunday this month in honor of National Poetry Month.
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