A LESSON AT YORKTOWN

It was a late autumn day
when father took us, the children,
to the woods around the battlefields
where we often played our games of mocked war,
each man choosing a stick to stock between his shoulder and breast,
a stick on which to rest his cheek in the taking of aims.

But Father must have forgot the time period we were reinacting,
for as he charged towards me, 
me scrambling behind the earthen works of some ancient redoubt,
he came so madly that his red flannel shirt tore on the wind
and the limbs bearing a bronzed body
while his face stripped into the visage of a savage,
and his lifted stick, brandished as a club, hoisted him to legendary size
only to come crashing down on my screaming head.

Forever imprinted was the reason for war.

Regiments still march to the rhythm
of the drummer-boy tapping his drumsticks
on the head of his drum.

I HEAR YOU LAST EAR

I hear you last ear of corn calling
from the hoot-owl warehouse of American history
the bloated winds of starved infants
gut a drought wrought field
into clouds of empty dust bowls
overturned as the sky of the day -
and I expect to see that sunset again.

I HAVE SEEN THE WAY OF FAMILY

I have seen the way of family.
through a window overlooking a field
I watched the spotted deer, freshly born between 
the seasons of the gun,
beg their mother to walk them forth from the wood's edge
into the clover-green field for food.

And I saw the mother's sorrow, though her children did not,
as she took them to that field without a gesture of the 
trouble she knew was to come.
she simply stood watch grey-eyed, her creased ears on gaurd,
as her fawns lept in mockery of mother's severity.

I have seen this, the way of family,
because I was called after dinner to the window
where my step-father watches the ways of the deer he shall
hunt with the next season of the gun,
in the same way his father and uncle, now dead, called him.

VIRGINIAN SOIL

Virginian field, 
fallen brown with the sum of winter, tell me,
what wheat waits in your soil
to spring with the weather and ride the wind?

Were once you a stretch of Indian hut skins
puffing smoke against the falling leaves down
by the brook bank which led a less eroded path
in days gone towards the river towards the sea
by which America was yet to be found 
by them from the east?

But when they did what purpose did you serve?
for certainly to them all land was only means to an end
of the prayer recited eve and eve again
before supper, which you taught them 
through the wooded chapel built from the grounds
of your Sunday morning mists.

Long-worked field, through your back
what battle-lines have been plowed
into fronts between farmer and drought,
tractor and mule, owl and mouse;
Where Virginia's sons fell with the foe
into a brotherhood of blood
face down in a puddle of their vowels
hung now from the whispering boughs of your edge?

Indeed, the clouds now built above reflect when once,
fed by hatred, a cross flamed in your midst
chanted townsmen of high standing hidden beneath
white suits and pointed hats which by day
dried clean on clotheslines between 
the sheets of the beds of their boys,
but by night all but their eyes are hidden,
in which, so black, spark the flame, while you cry.
And you cried for rain.

On your quilt of green where sat the picnickers 
on Saturday afternoons in the spring?
Families by the trees so the kids could climb
and see the lovers in the gulley
kissing beneath twirling parasol shade with weak knees
did the ramblers walk the fallen fence-line which once marked
a farm of hogs whose waste has made so fecun your soil?

All the life you must have held those nights the circus came to town.
You, laughing at the prod of the canes of the elders,
glancing with a giggle up the ironed skirts of all the curtsy ladies,
lapping down scoops of ice-cream fallen from the cones in 
the hands of the boys who turned from you
to stare at the loft of the big-top pinned in your soil:
clowns, magic, and the hanging tightropes.

But who were they beyond the reign of the glow of that night?
Those without a face, without a voice,
those floats ignored by the townsfolk
as nothing more than your summer's eve ground fog.

Virginian field,
fallen brown with the weight of winter, tell me,
what shadows can you hold with the sun now sunk from the sky
granting quarter to the moon
gleaming on the point of the plow that by day
broke your soil at the hands of the man, blind and grey,
who now farms you, above the drone of diesle smog?

Tell me, with all the lives you have fed, 
fallen brown with the ill of winter,
what are you now but a graveyard of one broken headstone,
the Persimmon tree there on the mound in your middle,
cracking the sky with its limbs overgrown
though not yet bent by your bitter fruit - the food that will feed
the resting farmer, the pregnant deer, and the soil with the seeds
for further trees to grow with their roots 
wrapped in all these tales of the dead
baying hard on their hunt towards tomorrow 
for the harvest that fills the field
of a Virginian soul. 


ŠJeff Bunting, 2007

Copyright Jimmy Warner, 2007