a poem

I decided to share my favorite of the poems I've written. I wrote a couple years ago. that said, don't cut me up too badly, the muses are more fragile than the furies.

"I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."  Abraham Lincoln, 4 March 1861, 1st Inaugural

(lacking a title that does it justice. but it's about lincoln)

There was a note of pleading in his voice that March day,

But I'm not sure that they heard it.

They couldn't know the price he would have to pay. 

There was too much on their minds.

As he said farewell at a Springfield station platform,

How many of them knew?

Had they grown to regard his integrity as the norm,

And only miss his silhouette?

Did they realize that the next time he'd return

It would be with eyes closed

And a delicate woman in black who would learn

To show nothing but red eyes?

Here on a cot, half a leg gone, half my sanity, too.

He's outside, a giant in his top hat.

As he scanned the camp, his eyes mirrored what I knew

As screams of pain echoed.

Were I as strong as he, I would never have cried.

He accepts duty with dignity;

But who guessed what weeping we might have spied

In the White House, alone.

As she pulled on white gloves and put a jewel in her hair,

Tiny feet in satin shoes,

And floated like angelic silk down the fairy tale stair

To her waiting, noble prince,

Had all fear been whisked away, or did it just hide

Til the wisp of a shadow

Roared in her ears and a scream wrenched her throat wide

As his blood splattered her cheek?

Now he lies on a cot, but still his eyes stare tearless,

Fearless, facing the light.

Do they smile sadly at the irony of the killer's success

That will bring only failure?

And the little gloved hands grip his own desperately

As the pulsing blood slows

To a trickle that runs down the bedpost freely

And puddles in her lap.

Now the missing silhouette is forever burned into our mind.

Or is it our pockets?

And our memories of the most human leader, we find,

Are neglected altogether.