The Confederate soldiers came for the freed slaves.
They had not thought to escape but had been freed
by the Union army. They were being paid wages.
But the Confederate soldiers ripped them from their children,
cut off their hands, branded their faces, dragged them
in groups until they collapsed. Nothing that hadn’t been
done before, that isn’t done now—one hundred four
people killed this summer in Milwaukee, a hundred twenty
in New Orleans. “More dangerous to be caught without
your gun than to be caught with it,” says the police chief.
A ten-year-old child, a “cub of the Caliphate,” has beheaded
a Syrian officer. Twenty-five child executioners stand
with their guns pointed at each bowed head in Palmyra.
Before Palmyra itself was rubble. I want to say all this
before I tell you the lake is smooth this morning,
with a faint sheen, the way it is in autumn. That I am not
able to go on with the horror. That it is all true. That poetry
is as awful as the rest, with its face directly in the passing
beauty, with its mourning, its helpless words. How long
it has stood, with its cocked gun, trying to save the world,
to wake it up to the dangers? Its heart has been breaking
for centuries, breaking and raging. It wants to tie you
to the altar, and if God didn’t utter the words of release,
it would shed your blood to prove how full of faith it is.
How sure, sure it is, of something yet to be revealed.