Classic Poem

When the Civil War ended, when Johnny came marching home, the boy-soldiers
who had lost the sweet sheaths of their arms and their legs made their way back as well,
the ones who had been held down on the operating tables by Walt Whitman himself,
boy-whisperer, wound-dresser, the operating tables that were really barn doors appropriated
for the war effort, torn down and propped on two saw-horses, for the crop to be gathered,
the terrible gleaning, the barn doors bucket-rinsed of the blood from the previous soldier,
whose arm or whose leg was now joined to the pile outside the hospital tent, the pile
Whitman saw and first took to be firewood, the pile big enough to fill up a horse cart,
the boys given the bit, the black bullet to bite on while the doctors went at it with a saw,
with a vengeance, on their arms, on their legs, Whitman pressing down on them, his lips
to their mouths, telling them their sweethearts would still marry them, would be helpmeets,
handmaidens, would ease them into bed, kiss them into silence the way that he had,
would name their little boys after him, would set them out walking, sun-colored, in circles,
little Whitmans, dizzy in the wheatfields, an army of children, lifting their arms to the light.











From Poetry Magazine, September 2006. Used with permission.