ALLEGIANCE
Spit out your fighting words standing.
I own a sixteen-room house - with a
man-sized baker's oven in the great
room where I could cook you alive.
Nothing else is like it in the world.
It was built in 1852 - right before,
in its day, the Civil War, when all
things had a different meaning, and
everything, even the small, was large.
It was, then, just the way we lived.
-
I have slipped my shingles now behind
the meager pilings of whatever is left
from the civic fencing. OK then, no
not really. Those are the posts where
the Virginia men died. We never gave
anything back, and left it there as a
memorial graveyard for the men who
perished. The fighting was right here,
along this field. The dead we buried
afterwards; those left alive, well, those
that crazy poet came and prayed over -
until they too, eventually, perished.
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