“The light of the future eternal” sometimes breaks on a life,
as Henry Kyd Douglas believed it touched
Stonewall Jackson when he broke his order mid-sentence-
“No, no, let us cross over the river and rest
in the shade of the trees.”
And it doesn’t always flare at the end, nor only strike
great generals—as Douglas himself learned
one night in Virginia
when he bedded his troops in an open field behind
the cavalry pickets. It was cloudy,
but not cold for winter. “In the middle of the night
I felt moisture on my face, and covering myself
from head to foot in a blanket
I slept soundly.” And imagine a suffocating
absence of dreams, of waking
“oppressed with heat,” the unnatural weight of the dark
burying you in a second of fear.
But beyond it, the awe, the simple joy
of rising up and shaking off that half-foot of snow,
of seeing outstretched from your feet the whole white field
mounded with graves,
and one by one in the early light
the glazed mounds quivering awake, each hopeless soldier
sitting up, brushing off
a fine dust, astonished to be rising from a cloud.
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