Member Poem

George Tecumseh Sherman’s Ghosts

Florida, 1914

Most nights, you mention him,
the ghosts rise from the cypress
come back to wail and moan.
Haints all look the same,
can’t tell the whites from the Brothers,
‘cause the war took every one alike,
and some still stick around.

It’s been nigh fifty years, Granpappy say,
back when it was the Civil war,
and that man with crazy eyes came through --
old General Sherman and his men,
took our food, our mules,
even our women along the way,
burning and blazing every field,
cotton or corn or sugar cane,
telling us we join up,
so’s we’d be free, that’s what they said.

Granpappy almost starved,
beings how the soldiers got the food
and only scraps for the Brothers that survived;
still more drowned at Ebeneezer Creek
trying so hard to keep up,
a-marching straight to hell,
all the while still being slaves,
no better than the Reb’s to them.

But them haints, General Sherman,
they all look the same.