Writing Challenge: Shadow

Here’s a poem that I think fits, however not perfectly, the writing challenge offered on poet Adele Kenny’s blog, The Music In It. Adele asks her readers to write a shadow poem. If you’re interested, follow this link to Adele’s challenge.

This is one of the first poems in my developing manuscript, The Journals of Lt. Arthur Kendal Everly: Poems of the American Civil War. In it, Everly, a teacher, fears that war is imminent.

——-

This is the Place

April 1, 1861

Here, beneath these trees –
oak and ash – shadows lay
like blankets spread
for a community of picnics.
I feast on a moment’s song:

breezes, still laced
with March’s chill, weave
as ribbons about these limbs,
Giggling children dart
behind stalwart trunks

hiding from each other and me –
children teasing me, their teacher,
as I walked to school.

But this spring rumbles.
Men who drape themselves
in the dark robes of politics

brandish words as warriors
brandish swords –
and I am afraid.

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