Maryland, my Maryland, and other poems/At Fort Pillow
AT FORT PILLOW
You shudder as you think upon
The carnage of the grim report,
The desolation when we won
The inner trenches of the fort.
But there are deeds you may not know
That scourge the pulses into strife;
Dark memories of deathless woe
Pointing the bayonet and knife.
The house is ashes where I dwelt
Beyond the mighty inland sea,
The tombstones shattered where I knelt
By that old church upon the lee.
The prowling fiends who came with fire
Camped on the consecrated sod,
And trampled in the dust and mire
The holy tenement of God!
The spot where darling mother sleeps,
Beneath the glimpse of yon sad moon,
Is crushed, with splintered marble heaps,
To stall the horse of some dragoon.
And when I ponder that black day,
It makes my frantic spirit wince;
I marched—with Longstreet—far away,
But have beheld the ravage since.
The tears are hot upon my face,
When thinking what bleak fate befell
The only sister of our race—
A thing too horrible to tell.
They say that ere her senses fled,
She rescued, of her brothers cried,
Then feebly bowed her stricken head,
Too good to live thus—so she died.
Two of those brothers heard no plea,
With their proud hearts for ever still—
Guy, shrouded by the Tennessee,
And Bertram at the Malvern Hill.
But I have heard it everywhere,
Vibrating like a mystic knell;
’Tis as perpetual as the air
And solemn as a funeral bell.
By scorched lagoon and murky swamp,
My wrath was never in the lurch;
I’ve killed the picket in his camp,
And many a pilot on his perch.
With steady rifle, sharpened brand,
A week ago, upon my steed,
With Forrest and his warrior band,
I made the hell-hounds writhe and bleed.
You should have seen our leader go
Upon the battle’s burning marge,
Swooping, like falcon, on the foe,
Heading the gray line’s iron charge.
All outcasts from our ruined marts,
We heard th’ undying serpent hiss,
And, in the desert of our hearts,
The fatal spell of Nemesis.
The Southern yell rang loud and high,
The moment that we thundered in,
Smiting the demons hip and thigh,
Cleaving them to the very chin.
My right arm, bared for fiercer play,
The left one held the rein in slack;
In all the fury of the fray,
I sought the white man, not the black.
The dabbled clots of brain and gore
Across the swirling sabers ran;
To me each brutal visage bore
The front of one accursed man.
Trobbing along the frenzied vein,
My blood seemed kindled into song—
The death-dirge of the sacred slain,
The slogan of immortal wrong.
It glared athwart the dripping glaives—
It blazed in each avenging eye—
The thought of desecrated graves
And some lone sister’s desperate cry!