The Place Where Pickett Charged: A Southerner’s Lament

Mine eyes have seen the glory . . . An acorn strikes the earth as if to call distinction between voices imagined and the ground beneath my feet. Inside my heart a young boy runs crying, panicked by a carnage too great to bear. And I . . . I walk slowly like an old man to my car and drive away down Hagerstown Road. If not for a few decisions and the falling of darkness, I might have gone across that expanse to the Copse of Trees and a gray stone fence, and maybe lingered, maybe stayed . . . where the pale and purple fl owers grow.