WE WOULD NOT SIT QUIET WITH OUR LANGUAGES AT STAKE

I went to the end of the Civil War,
where Walt Whitman and I walked through
a broad low field, where we turned over
the shriveled bodies of soldiers with our feet,
and popped antique buttons off of uniforms.
We ruffled through certain pockets,
stuffing small gifts from widows and
other symbols of what the dead men used to be into
stolen knapsacks. Then we
sat on bloody tree stumps and wrote as many poems as we could
before our languages became strange again.


© 1992 Daniel X. O'Neil

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