Sample Poem – Confederate

Memorial to Confederate Dead

Old Town, Alexandria

He stands,
contemplating something
at his feet:
the effects of winter
rain perhaps,
or sleet—
though on occasion
carnations appear,
as if his downturned eyes
had raised them from genuine earth:

how the sun shone
on dew-stilled lupines—
the swish of feet
through wet timothy—
the spring-like call of a wren
across dawn meadows
before the first deaths—
the grief of bugles
still lives in present horns;

but more
than a lost morning,
more than echoed voices
that have lost
their source,
more than the metaphysics
of defeat—

more than we
who never had a cause,
who spend our lives
in cars
can ever know . . .

Lucid Waking