January 26,1832 Poem by Bob Bowers

On January 26,1832, James Morton
Married his second wife
Mary Parkinson
In Marion County, Illinois
Which has nothing to do with you
Or any of us much anymore
Except that she lived and loved that day
Not knowing,
Couldn’t even fathom
The war that would tear her apart
In but thirty years’ time.

It was that war that taught us to preserve
Our fallen bodies, pump them full of chemicals
So they could last long enough to be fed to the worms,
Mathew Brady’s photos of bloated carcasses
sinking into the mud
Being too crass and disgusting for our sensibilities
When wars should be so much more humane
Idylls to observe from distant hills
Fall’s colors drifting down from maples and oaks
Much like the trees growing loops of rope in the
Days after that war.

It was the photographs that emasculated
all the glory,
The riding on trains to French fields
singing songs of love,
Sliding through the jungles of ‘Nam
mano a mano
Until camera shots strafed the beauty of it
Showed us bloodied corpses
Bullets to brains
spattering on blue skies.

February 17,2009