The Flower Beds of War

        —Fort Gaines, Dauphin Island, Alabama

Today, as in that war we christened civil,Spring arrives around these magazines.Examine the cannon mounts that used to swivel;The tidal flushing of its brick latrines;

And look where violets and grass have spreadBeside the ramparts facing west and east.Was it not so when soldiers there fell dead,When only flax and thistles kept the peace?

Can we distinguish flower from weedWhen each is uniformed in blue or dun,On battlefields, or in the human seed,Where life and death are waging to be won?

We rage and kill and also love and bless.One grows around the other, truce and bruise,And can't be separated, unlessWe silence one and lose them both, and lose

This relic of antique belligerenceThat nature calls a garden, we a fort,Where spring, with its sublime indifference,Has flanked the guns with clumps of spiderwort.