PEMBROKE MAGAZINE: SOUTHERN WRITERS

The new issue of Pembroke Magazine is fresh off the press, focused on the American South and edited by Jennifer Key, herself a rising young poet with many accolades to her credit, including a prize from Shenandoah, one of the country's most celebrated literary journals.  I hope to feature her work eventually on this blog.

Jennifer asked me to send her some poems for this issue, which I was happy to do.  The following piece had its beginning twelve years ago while I was at the Hambidge Center in north Georgia.  I had brought stacks of journals I'd kept, filled with drafts of poems in handwriting I often could no longer read terribly well.  I pulled a few lines out from my scribbles, typed them into a disk on my ancient Mac, and proceeded to forget them.  This spring I pulled them out again and completed this poem.

I grew up reading my father's weighty books on the Civil War, haunted by the photographs of soldiers and battlefields, memorizing descriptions of the battlefields.....Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg.  At the center of my fixation, though, was Sherman's march through Georgia, branded forever into my memory by Gone With the Wind.  I wrote at least three poems about that experience, one entitled " Seeing GWTW for the Sixth Time," an obsession halted, I hope, by the the last GWTW poem I will ever write (I hope) titled "Gone Again."  This poem comes at the subject of William Tecumseh Sherman from another angle.     War is still hell, and we have only to look at our latest battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan to see the wasteland it creates, the scorched earth approach that Sherman practiced so well.

 From a Safe Distance

“War is hell,” Sherman said,

torching his way from Atlanta 

to the port of Savannah,

with God knows how many

small towns left burning between.

But tonight who’d believe him?

This new war’s a video game.

Push a button.  

Just look, we are winning,

the missiles on target,

 the clean zap of

bombs hitting bulls-eye! 

A child’s game

for overgrown children. 

A genius,  that S.O.B. Sherman,

he knew, once a war has been turned loose, 

it goes where it bloody well pleases.

Growing up, I found war

in the pages of Civil War volumes  

my father collected.  Photos of Stonewall

and Lee, the lost faces of 15 year olds

and the corpses at Shiloh seemed more real 

than counterparts snapped during D-Day

or, later, the peasants  

littering a road outside My Lai.  

Back then war was a book 

I could open or close when I wanted

and draw from a safe distance

its inevitable conclusions. 

No photos tonight of the slain

on my television screen,

no houses scattered like book pages

ripped from their spines,

but soon we’ll see leakage of bodies

blown into a digitized rubble by pilots

who speak with an accent I understand,

down-home and commonsense.

Do what you have to do.  

Lock on those suckers

and bring them down.  Sherman

would be pleased, the streets burning,

nothing much left of another small town. 

My Lai----Photo by Ronald L. Haeberle