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Civil War in Seventh Period
It took us over an hour to seize McPherson’s Ridge,
that anvil, our teacher rhapsodized,
which would break the hammer
of Lee’s army. Apparently the Confederacy couldn’t be defeated
without the help of metaphors.
Culp’s Hill, Cemetery Hill, Seminary Ridge --
by Friday we were exhausted
from going up and down so many eminences,
Peach Orchard Salient, Little Round Top.
It was up to us, every day,
between 11:15 a.m. and 12:05 p.m.. to free the slaves,
which was no small task
since the sun chose precisely that period
to find the backs of our necks.
In the middle of the Battle of Antietam it slipped inside our shirts
and worked its way down our legs
by the time we stormed Atlanta.
It made our eyelids heavy at the most inopportune moments.
While men at Cold Harbor sewed notes into their uniforms --
Daughter, remember me. Mother I’m sorry. June 3. I was killed
--
we were falling asleep at our posts.
Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Petersburg, Sharpsburg --
how could we keep all those burgs straight?
By the time we’d marched from Wilderness to Five Forks,
360,022 Union soldiers had given their lives
to their flag, 258,000 Rebels
to their flag, and it was already April
and our minds were on other things beside saving the Union.
Like Grant before Appomattox, Mr. Brengle paced the room,
but our thoughts were elsewhere
on the sun that caressed our faces as we drowsed
through The Terms of Surrender. Right before lunch
he made it clear that we were letting down Abraham Lincoln.
Our teacher’s next favorite activity,
besides fighting the Civil War on the blackboard,
was making us ashamed to be fifteen and bored.
He knew who the real enemy of America was: boys
just like us throughout our troubled nation
allowing themselves to be distracted
by something insignificant as light.
-Chris Bursk
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This issue's guest editor Alicia
Ostriker:
Alicia Suskin Ostriker has been twice nominated
for a National Book Award, she is author of numerous volumes of
poetry, most recently No Heaven as well as The Little
Space: Poems Selected and New, 1968-1998. Ostriker's poems have
appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Antaeus,
The Nation, Poetry, American Poetry Review,
Kenyon Review, The Atlantic, MS, Tikkun,
and many other journals, and have been widely anthologized.
As a critic Ostriker is the author of two pathbreaking
volumes on women's poetry, Writing Like a Woman and Stealing
the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America. She
has also published two books on the Bible, Feminist Revision
and the Bible and the controversial The Nakedness of the
Fathers; Biblical Visions and Revisions, a combination of prose
and poetry that re-imagines the Bible from the perspective of a
contemporary Jewish woman. Her most recent book is Dancing at
the Devil's Party: Essays on Poetry, Politics and the Erotic.
Ostriker has received awards from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco
State Poetry Center, the Judah Magnes Museum, the New Jersey Arts
Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
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