~ DELTA POETRY REVIEW ~

Chickamauga

I run with warrior’s ghosts
past bucolic battlefields shrouded
in the shade of battle-scarred trees
on a path once churned muddy
with blood spattered from the hearts
of men who ran for other causes.
The earth shakes beneath our pounding
pace, the pulse of cannons and unbridled
panic. The musty smell of death lingers,
thick enough to bite, despite the ablutions
of dew washed mornings, rinsing spring
rains, purifying summer sunlight. Fall’s
feathery frost sanctifies the wind whispered
stories of lives that passed here.
Snow blankets the earth like a sheet,
the softening shape all that remains.

The Memory of Old Jack
                                       After Wendell Berry
From the window where his daughter parks
his chair, his rheumy eyes see
the outline of the house where he was born,
his father’s Model T parked
beside the garage. A breeze
blows soft on his skin as he jumps naked
from Marney’s Bluff into the chill
of deep water, swims to the bottom
and back with a handful of mud
as proof. The marching
band plays “Pomp and Circumstance”
while he sweats in cap and gown
and waits for his handshake
and diploma. A troop train clatters
and shakes the rails. Its wailing
whistle fades across the river bridge
and disappears into the second World
War, leaving him lost in sound and fury.
He’s in the parlor of a Georgia civil servant
wearing a borrowed suit,
standing with a girl he used
to know. The woman who witnesses
the wedding wears her apron
and a puff of flour in her hair.
He smiles and welcomes
sons and daughters who appear
then blend into a collage
of familiar but nameless faces,
who hold his hand and beg
him to remember things he can’t forget.

Ron Lands is currently a member of the teaching faculty in the Department of Medicine at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and where he practices hematology. He has published in small literary journals and anthologies, as well as essays and poems in the humanities sections of medical journals. He practiced medicine for years near the community where he grew up and was privileged to treat lifelong friends and a few relatives. His stories and poems come from that experience.