Fredericksburg Haibun

This poem was inspired by a poem by Robert Hass, On Visiting The DMZ at Panmunjom: Haibun.  His poem reminded me what its like to visit, and grow up on and around battlefields.  The quantity of lives lost is a rich reminder at the start of his prose.  I  like how the haiku is a shift from man's destruction to the harmony of nature.  

Fredericksburg Haibun

Union Yank encampments were north of the Rappahannock, a brown murky river flowing west to east.  The town sits on the fall line: the tidewater to the right, the piedmont to the left. A dot upon the map General’s Lee and Burnside poured upon hourly, yet separated from one another not only by the river but the color of their uniform.  Confederate Reb cannon’s and trench’s were dug into Marye’s Heights, granting over-watch of the once beautiful city, now occupied by snipers hiding within dilapidated churches firing from steeples on an enemy, once countrymen, struggling to construct pontoon bridges in the cold month of December.  Upon finally gaining a foothold in the city, brief urban combat ensued in the streets but the majority of gray dressed forces settled in behind a stonewall and from positions on the heights south west of the city.  Fourteen times men dressed in blue charged the stonewall and fourteen times they were repelled.  Thirteen of those times men charged over the bodies of their comrades at the stone wall, most falling themselves, building what must have looked like a wall of corpses.

Bones and bullets buried

beneath shopping malls, soil no

longer stained with blood.