The Mule
“He came like God in judgment” I was told…
down our dirt road Lord Sherman marched
through the Onslow’s rural roads
passing great-grandpa’s house,
God and his “bummers” slashing,
pillaging and plaguing our Ervintowne…
Noisy yanks, without mercy…
spoiled.
Jehovah Tecumseh, too…
and his horsemen marching
to the sea, roaring… you could
hear them five miles out… God’s tide
rising, swelling…no ebb in sight
for this noisy hornet’s nest
approaching from Huffmantowne…
slowly.
Jewelry and butter and things
of worth were hid deeply down our well,
well past visual light… Submerged.
Here great-grandma hid her daughters two,
my Grandmother Laura
and Great Aunt Emma…
back to the water womb,
secured.
She wanted them spared…left,
and not taken. Like the tome of Noah
when the wicked were raptured by waves of goodbye,
and the righteous remained… Fueled, wet watered
sentiments that would be sown…
by mothers and daughters and heirs yet unknown
in damp darkness…
safe.
A hundred forty-four months I played in dirt the General tromped…a century before. Long I washed from the same well, trying to come clean where God’s fallen angels filled their canteens… the same well God’s horse-thieves had been refreshed. I too drank, from where Laura and Emma shivered and dreamed, where Wild Willy Sherman took the horses, but left our mule…standing. Then I arose, at just thirteen, and took that mule… for he, like me…
stubborn.
We traveled back through witnessed fields
where that Yahweh Yankee spied him, laden and sterile.
He adamantly… waiting for me…so overlooked
he had no name… just a strong pat streak
of packaged loss, that could pull a furrowed plow
when hitched in fear… to open rows of scar-tissued fields…
his civil war he wagoned still…
strapped.
He knew the “Ghee” and “Haw” of southern tongue and a war un-won. A burden left for one so young, and torn by his remedy. By night, I burned each wagon hitch, each harnessed hate and traitor’s kiss and forged the plows into a sword by which I slew my burdened beast… that Sherman left within our gate five score ago. I put him down by river’s sand. He breathed his last at summer’s end of ’68 when I, a man…
surrendered.
Lovedmadlydeeplymuchly…
