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by Craig Challender

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(“Excerpt from Come You Masters of War” mobile version)

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Marye’s Heights, Fredericksburg, Virginia
13th December 1862

 

They seemed to melt like snow coming down on
wet ground. I guess if you’re an officer
behind the lines that’s how it looked. For us
no such poetry. A stiff wind. Freezing
weather, flat stretch of ground pocked with bodies,
mounds of Union blue we had to pick our
way around like cow pies in a pasture.
We were the twelfth assault. The only heat
that night was man-made fire—line of muskets
from behind a chest-high stone wall at the
base of that goddamned hill, cannon above.
No snow melt, just cold harvest: men cut down
like winter wheat. Fitzgerald burst apart
beside me—splut!—and my feet slicked skyward.

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Craig Challender is an Emeritus Professor of English at Longwood University in Farmville, VA, where he taught American literature, mythology and creative writing (poetry) for thirty-six years and also directed the school’s reading series. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, among them The Sewanee Review, Tar River Poetry, Paterson Literary Review, The Midwest Quarterly, and Arts & Letters. He has published three chapbooks and four full-length collections:  Familiar Things (Linwood Publishers, 1998); Dancing On Water (Pecan Grove Press, 2005); As Details Become Available (Pecan Grove, 2012); and Capable Ways (Scurfpea, 2017). Come You Masters of War, a decade-long project, is now looking for a home.

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