Two Poems

Blood Blackened Boards

The ladies of the Restoration Association replaced
The parlor floor of Fredricksburg’s Kenmore Plantation
During the 1920s when the preservation began,
The guide, a genteel lady with softly graying hair,
Told our assembled tour group.

As the room had been used as a Civil War surgery,
The boards had been stained dark from blood.

Young men’s blood had colored the floorboards at Chatham, too,
And those of the Presbyterian Church, and the Episcopalian as well.

Today, the lady with the quiet gray voice said,
We wish that the original floors had been left untouched,
For the authenticity of the restoration project.

Step gently, I thought, where old men in calfskin shoes
Trampled out the vintage from grapes of wrath,
Bitter harvest no longer stored
Soaked in blood blackened boards,
A wine harvested from a nation’s youth.

 
Brown-Outs

Gordon, my first cousin once removed,
Belonged to Tom Brokaw’s Greatest Generation.
He traded the tedium of milking cows and making hay
For the excitement of piloting bombers in Europe.

Not until his son had become an old man,
Did Gordon tell him about the brown-outs.

One happened on a mission
When German fighter planes began picking off bombers in the formation,
Systematically,
One by one;
When Gordon’s airplane was next in line for obliteration,
Inexplicably, the fighters left.

Gordon had already experienced his brown-out.

In times of war we cull our strongest sons,
Trading them like baseball cards
For land, for oil, and someday, for water.

Young men with the good fortune to survive
Return home too embarrassed to speak of the horror they experienced,
The terror that literally frightened the shit out of them.
Like Gordon, they marry and father children and repay mortgages;
Like him, they may not attend church again,
Haunted by images of their acts of desecration.

Gordon couldn’t sever himself from his band of brothers,
Road-tripping to attend reunions
Until he died a good death
Gone from a heart attack before he hit his kitchen floor.

Gary Jones, a freelance writer and teacher, lives near Sister Bay tending gardens with his wife of many years.