Dante at Shiloh

Civil War battle scene

From the original painting by Mort Künstler The Angle © 1988 Mort Künstler, Inc.

Dante at Shiloh

I.

I found myself in the aftermath.
Cannonades had set the woods ablaze,
felled whole trees, swept the earth

with canister and grape. From bodies
and body parts heaped up by musketry
(Aim low and be deliberate, boys.)

a strangeling crawled––Blue or Gray
I couldn’t tell––from the Minié balls’ last meal.
Straining to break their cannon free,

dead horses, still in harness, hauled.
Voices out of the burning undergrowth
wept for water as the field fell still.

At the iron dice of war, both sides lost.
Wild pigs won, squabbling over their feast.

II.

It started to rain and with it came a troupe
of orators––men of God,
carpetbaggers of every stripe.

Gingerly, to avoid the mud,
they stepped from one corpse to the next,
crossing the swamp, slipping on blood.

One started to speak, “Brethren in Christ…”
but stopped, perplexed, to see another man
wearing his face. This progressed,

speaker after speaker, until soon
each searched in panic through the group,
and when he found his stolen face, that one

he mounted and buggered, like boar on boar–
in self-love or -loathing, I wasn’t sure.

John Barr/Innisfree Poetry Journal