by Maxine Kumin

On Being Asked to Write a Poem for the Centenary of the Civil War

Good friend, from my province what is there to say?
My mother’s grandfather left me here
rooted in grateful guilt,
who came, an escaped conscript
blasted out of Europe in 1848;
came, mourned by all his kin
who put on praying hats
and sat a week on footstools there;
plowed forty days by schooner
and sailed in at Baltimore
a Jew, and poor;
strapped needles up and notions
and walked packaback across
the dwindling Alleghenies,
his red beard and nutmeg freckles
dusting as he sang.

There are no abolitionists in my past to point to.
The truth is that this man,
my only link with that event,
prospered in Virginia, begat
eight young and sewed eight years
on shirts to get them bread.
When those warm states stood up to fight,
the war made him a factory
in a pasture lot where he sat,
my part-time pacifist,
stitching uniforms for the Confederates.
The gray cloth made him rich;
they say he lived to lose it all.
I have only a buckle and a candlestick
left over, like old rhetoric,
from his days
to show how little I belong.
This is the way I remember it was told,
but in a hundred years
all stories go wrong.

 

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This poem appeared in Maxine Kumin’s Selected Poems 1960-1990, W.W. Norton, 1998. Used with permission of the author.