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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2007 : Paul Hamill
A QUIET EVENING BY FORT JOHNSON
(James Island, South Carolina)
Better to kill one's enemies,
Said Machiavelli, than spare them
While seizing their estates:
The clan forgives the murder,
But never theft of status.
Why do I think of that
Patrolling, late at night,
My groomed, well-watered suburb
On an arm of Charleston's harbor?
I know the moon-shaved suede
Of the lawns implies exclusions:
Not only of certain classes
But also of certain risks.
We say we keep our heads up
In our small holdings, trim
The shrubs, attend the cookouts;
In fact we keep heads down,
Raise the kids private, fret
At money or sex or the whole
Of life behind closed doors.
Lately the nights have flowered
With signs that point to nothing:
Random and rootless panics,
The bourgeois understory.
Last night, for instance: an oak
Erupted in a whine
Like twenty power saws—
Cicadas by the dozen,
Startled, yelled at me.
Tonight, I look past Folly
To where a storm speeds down
The sea, flashing in silence
As if pursuing Jonah
Fleeing his promise to serve.
This island, scrub and marsh,
Was a desperate corner
Of siege (For wars have nooks
And wallows, anonymous
As the deaths they give). Swamp fog
And smoke and wandering firefights,
The Battle of James Island,
Straggled from copse to hummock.
From here the star shell rose
To open fire on Sumter,
Hanging as if to light
The Magi, birth an age.
Beauregard's student corps
Saw it, yanked their lanyards.
The Federal captain at Sumter—
"Federal" meant enemy now—
Had been Pierre G.T.'s
Instructor in gunnery.
How little one can own!
Across the tidal stream
I saw the island remnant
Where Shaw and his black troops
Assaulted Battery Wagner,
Half the unit falling
To savage cross-fire with him,
All heaped in shallow graves
The tides have washed away.
Some ancient lands and towns
Are layered invisibly,
Hallowed or burned so often
Citizens shrug at the record
Overwriting it
With their own quiet lives.
It doesn't change one's trade
Or daily soup to live
In Florence, Nuremberg,
Or Isle-de-France. But where
There is one story, it floats
Like swamp-decay, a question
Ripe to one's nostrils. What price
For risk? What price for none?
This poem was a finalist in the 2007 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Paul Hamill
Paul Hamill works at Ithaca College in upstate New York when not sailing on Lake Cayuga. Publications include The Year of Blue Snow (Edwin Mellen Press, 2001) and Winter Mind (Pudding House, 2003). He is the Tompkins County (NY) poet laureate for 2007.
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