04-15-2016, 12:19 AM
Billy - The Enemy Within reads like a refugee from The Basement Tapes. I am guessing that irreverence is one of your many strong suits.
JM - excellent, especially S.2.
CIdermaid - not the cheeriest of messages, but probably more accurate. I enjoyed reading.
- - - -
April 14 is the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - 1865. Of course any poetic treatment of that subject would necessarily call to mind Walt Whitman's O Captain! My Captain! It goes without saying that I am not up such a task. So my thoughts fell to the field hospitals and the amputations occasioned by the meat grinder of the American Civil War as today's subject.
Civil War Surgeons
A twisted history, perhaps irony –
the roughly coextensive arrival
of surgical anesthetics together
with industrial volumes of grapeshot,
shrapnel, canister.
Mannassas, Shiloh, Seven Pines,
Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill.
By nightfall stench and screams shrouded
the field, then shuttled to field hospitals
strewn across a stunned theatre of war.
Antietam, Stones River, Vicksburg,
the big one at Gettysburg.
Feet,
hands, legs, arms.
In truth maybe they took too few.
Their war was against
infection.
Rot.
Chickamauga, The Wilderness, Cold Harbor,
Cedar Creek, Sailor's Creek. . . .
JM - excellent, especially S.2.
CIdermaid - not the cheeriest of messages, but probably more accurate. I enjoyed reading.
- - - -
April 14 is the anniversary of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - 1865. Of course any poetic treatment of that subject would necessarily call to mind Walt Whitman's O Captain! My Captain! It goes without saying that I am not up such a task. So my thoughts fell to the field hospitals and the amputations occasioned by the meat grinder of the American Civil War as today's subject.
Civil War Surgeons
A twisted history, perhaps irony –
the roughly coextensive arrival
of surgical anesthetics together
with industrial volumes of grapeshot,
shrapnel, canister.
Mannassas, Shiloh, Seven Pines,
Gaines Mill, Malvern Hill.
By nightfall stench and screams shrouded
the field, then shuttled to field hospitals
strewn across a stunned theatre of war.
Antietam, Stones River, Vicksburg,
the big one at Gettysburg.
Feet,
hands, legs, arms.
In truth maybe they took too few.
Their war was against
infection.
Rot.
Chickamauga, The Wilderness, Cold Harbor,
Cedar Creek, Sailor's Creek. . . .