A Place Of Today's Past Poem by David Welch

The silence of morn makes this place forlorn
in the fields, the hillsides, and trenches.
Over two hundred years since the bloodshed and fear,
yet you can hear the yells, smell the stenches.
The crush of the blue, charging straight and true
at the redcoats behind all their breast-works,
The bayonets clash, and the musket-balls crash,
the cannon's roar shaking all the Earth.
Two centuries gone by, you can still see the lines,
hear the cries of dying men down in the grass,
to some it's meadow, but to those in the know
Saratoga is a place of today's past.

In a Vegas hotel are some relics that tell
of a ship that tangled with an ice-berg.
The trinkets and things of those traveling,
raised up from the ocean and preserved.
From Gilded Age times, these objects passed b
you can imagine in a person's pocket.
Watches for a vest, tooth-paste and a dress,
dishes, satchels, and a locket.
And there, grey and dull, a big piece of hull
hangs before you just beyond your grasp,
these titanic remains, they make a good claim
for being a place of today's past.

A theater in D.C, it tells the sad story
of a great man who was cut down too soon.
Sitting in these rows, seeing the play go
until the shock comes from a pistol's loud boom.
Imagine the sounds when Wilkes-Booth leapt down,
the chaos, the confusion, the frenzy,
a war we had won, then the sound of a gun,
and a chase for a dastard enemy.
That theater this day means more than plays
echoing the sounds of that old blast,
we still feel it now, though we can't say how,
it's forever a place of today's past.

The present goes quick, there's no stopping it,
and the world it wrenches and spasms.
We forget about time and its endless line,
we pretend that it's like a great chasm.
But mankind don't change, we're much the same
as those past that we pretend we're beyond.
If we lived back then would we do different,
or would we the same road walk upon?
We find an old space, the present is erased,
and the memories start coming so fast,
we revisit that hell and we see ourselves
when we stand in a place of today's past.