Gettysburg Sniper
- Gettysburg Sniper
Unfair? I don't see it. Indiansfought from cover; if hairs were split, itwasn't over that. Yet generalsstill close ranks and send men marching tallat a hundred dug-in guns, dead-aimed.Where's fairness, walking into cannons?Such debates we had at school. Here, oncedistance windage came, the job was minefor I could always shoot. Honor layunmentioned. This rifle's true twentytimes beyond a musket. From those rocksthere he's hit enough of ours. I've seenhis glass shine to search me out. This timeif it glints, I'll have him. Fair is fair. [End Page 51]
Stephen Malin's verse has appeared in Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Green Mountain Review, Margie, Sewanee Review, and widely elsewhere. Selected for the half-century compilation of Southwest Review Reader, Malin's work has also appeared in Poetry, Southeast, Lyrical Voices, and other anthologies, while more of his poems, translated into Russian, were reprinted abroad in Amerika Illustrated. He and his wife, Joanne, live in the colonial town of Westminster, Maryland.
