Poets & Supermen

This poem by Jane Kenyon about the death of a soldier at Gettysburg resonated with me. Which side he was on, what war he fought in, what country he fought for and even which century it was are irrelevant. What matters is that his unborn children die with him, his girlfriend will never again know his sexual attentions and his 'enemy' will hold him no malice save for a passing thought of "save but for the grace of God there go I."

Gettysburg: July 1, 1863


The young man, hardly more
than a boy, who fired the shot
had looked at him with an air
not of anger but of concentration,
as if he were surveying a road,
or feeding a length of wood into a saw:
It had to be done just so.

The bullet passed through
his upper chest, below the collarbone.
The pain was not what he might
have feared. Strangely exhilarated
he staggered out of the pasture
and into a grove of trees.

He pressed and pressed
the wound, trying to stanch
the blood, but he could only press
what he could reach, and he could
not reach his back, where the bullet
had exited.
He lay on the earth
smelling the leaves and mosses,
musty and damp and cool
after the blaze of the open afternoon.

How good the earth smelled,
as it had when he was a boy
hiding from his father,
who was intent on strapping him
for doing his chores
late one time too many.

A cowbird razzed from a rail fence.
It isn't mockery, he thought,
no malice in it...just a noise.
Stray bullets nicked the oaks
overhead. Leaves and splinters fell.

Someone near him groaned.
But it was his own voice he heard.
His fingers and feet tingled,
the roof of his mouth,
and the bridge of his nose....

He became dry, dry, and thought
of Christ, who said, I thirst.
His man-smell, the smell of his hair
and skin, his sweat, the salt smell
of his cock and the little ferny hairs
that two women had known

left him, and a sharp, almost sweet
smell began to rise from his open mouth
in the warm shade of the oaks.
A streak of sun climbed the rough
trunk of the tree, but he did not
see it with his open eye.


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Someone has gone to a lot of work with a photo-editor to turn a Feldman photograph into Superboy. Eat your heart out Tom Welling: