With all the comments about the upcoming Civil War commemoration, I went to the vault to get this 1970’s poem that I wrote after my first visit to Civil War sites in Virginia.—PM

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A Confederate State

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We make a race course of Lee’s Retreat—

Past battlefields of weeds, past bronze signs noting water-stops

Of gray-coats lugging themselves toward cover.

And we hum by in a cream sedan, eating up chunks of highway,

Swallowing history too quickly to notice

A general’s sweaty hat or his charger

Or soldiers eating dry corn taken from mules.

We speed by the traces, then pull into a driveway

Close to Appomattox, knowing we’re short of their destination,

Not harried to surrender or bargaining for peace,

Although we’d like passes to get by hostile counties

On the way back to our own confederacies,

The linked states of our lives.

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—Paul Marion (c) 1984, 2009