Senior Year Selection

A poem from my senior year in high school. MORE THAN 10 YEARS OLD?!
~~~~~~

Reunion at Gettysburg

Suffering is interned within these pages
Before me. Its cold
Hands just missed my fragile heart.
I weep for my lack of death,
As a textbook returns me back again.

From across battlefields, unmerciful age
Charges, causes worn and sagging.
These brothers share the flesh
Of their kin, splashed wet on their uniforms.
These are survivors of battalions
Who gulped their own blood,
The neighbors of scorched ribs,
Shredded arms cast far from
Nameless bodies,
And apparitions feasted upon by gangrene.

All mailed by death, some lacked
The legs, the strong pillars
Of forty years before.
Instead of thunderous metal
Ripping through eyesockets,
Tears embrace. It is the unspeakable
Bond between bastards who survive.
Body on body, they walk back to hell.
Mouring for the dead, they live
For the useless waste of lost fathers,
Forsaken children, and the beauty
Of understanding, of sharing between souls.
Bayonettes forced brotherhood
Between these sworn enemies, dripping of life.
It is why the Civil War
Cries for itself.

-E. Andrew Coker
1-13-97 2nd Revision