Antietam Lullaby

[Brian Roberts]

   The rockets' red glare: I felt mechanical; the fences showed in the early light. No retreat? None listened to the cries in the front rank and the man next to me lacked the upper part of his head as o'er him a bomb burst in air.
   The anthem of one leg blown off & the other shattered; shrieking with pain: what a bloody place. I took a pistol and threatened the gleam of bright stars, the full glory reflected by the flag as it waved o'er the crash of canister through our line. The same could happen to the rest, making corpses & mutilated trunks of us all. On the field dimly covered in dead and wounded, the land of the free.
   Private Charley Spencer fell dead on my right; I was not sure whether Matthews was still there; their bombs bursting in our midst, no one thought about gallantly streaming flags. Hurt continued on. See, by the dawn lying just in front of us, completely deafened, we moved forward, exposed.
   Crossing the road, in column, batteries sang us shots of canister. O say do those rifle bullets pierce deep? (They do.) Dead and wounded before us, we pushed forward. Shell in abundance fitfully blows, half conceals, the iron bullets flew over. I first mounted the fence for a perilous fight, behind a better aimed banner.
   O long may the morning's first beam, whose broad stripes and twilight's last gleaming, showed that Henry Mallow fell & his brains had splattered the woods behind with an awful cry at the same time causing us many muscular contractions.
   I tried to rally them, but we retreated in disorder. What did the grape & canister half disclose? Now it saw our Regt. broken and shining bloody. I saw confusion & men down on both sides, in dread silence reposing, and the dead and wounded were piled there in heaps. Not so proudly we hailed that which swept away every breeze, though o'er God the flag was apparently still streaming.
   I looked, saw through the mists: myself. I felt all the dodging gave proof to something I felt: then another broken fence & our commander who waved the banner. "O say can you make it to the woods?" We crossed a most galling fire with a sound like thunder. Corpse-spangled was the cornfield. My friend Piper had fallen forward on his face and was motionless. Just then musketry from the ramparts we watched, coming from that sunken road toward which we advanced with grim determination, seeking the home of the brave.

I love the phenomenological, first-person stream-of-consciousness account of the savagery of battle. The patches of our anthem are well-rendered and poignant, "no one thought about gallantly streaming flags." I love the line: "Corpse-spangled was the cornfield." There seems to be a bit of Hemingway here in your flow. I am  not as well-versed in prose poetry as others on here......for me, the threatening of the "gleam of bright stars" is the "thesis statement," if you will.

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