This Day

This day I grab a handful of soil.

Soil that lay about your head stone. 

I squeeze it tightly with honor and

an ancestral sadness at your young

age.  Your budding youth.

 

This day I choose you William Edgerly.

Choose you from among the gathered.

Private in the 54th Massachusetts Infantry.

This day my hand and my heart know only

the color of valor in the life that has become

this soil upon which I stand.  

 

There is no hint of skin that hatefully split our

land in two.  The horror of one people claiming

superiority o’er all the others.  There is nothing

but your eyes, dear William, imploring me to speak

for all the lives (and all the other wondering eyes)

they represent.  The lives here gathered, both above

and below this dirt this day.

 

I have come here today – we have come here today –

to hold you up, brothers and sisters of Columbia and

the precincts that lay close at hand. Many of you died

in that great war that should never have taken place.

Others as the days of your living wore on in somewhat

earlier, or somewhat later generations. 

 

Some were mothers, some fathers, others were children;

some baked, some were merchants or ministers, some

worked the land, some raised bees, others livestock, and

still others did the work of that underground railroad

we hold most dear.  They sheltered the oppressed.

 

I do not know your stories, you men and women and

children gathered here together on Zion’s Hill.  But, I

can feel – we can feel – our kinship in the dirt. The place

from which we have all come, and the place to which we

shall all someday return - whispering songs and metered

verses under our breath as we clamber on for glory.

 

You, you young William Edgerly; at 21 years of age,

never even knew the line HE wrote that was

sewn into your bones - all the bones of them that died

in that ongoing and horrid conflagration - at death. 

The line about the honor and devotion that has welled

up in all us THE LIVING; “for which YOU gave the last

full measure of devotion.”  But we hold an empty

hollow in all our souls for this angry division we

have yet to bring to a close on the American Landscape. 

The still and yet unfinished work of which he alluded; and

of which we have carefully been sure our nation has eluded.

 

In our tears, in our grief, and in our shame

we have yet to uncover the means to wash

ourselves clean of division and so learn to

live one people, side by side in love.  We ask you

look on us and whisper the secret means by which

we may weave into wholeness the full measure of

the cloth of our common quilt as people.  Sing gently

on the morning light, mutter endlessly in the afternoon

rain, and give breathy words in the gloaming end

of day that we may know new truths to be self-evident. 

Truths that enable us to know the true worth of

being given another day to fill our lungs above

the soil upon which we stand.

 

Show us the entropic truth that as we crumble –

becoming dirt - we share space with each other in

a destiny that is common and one.  We hold your

tender and hopeful hand, young William and thank you

for rising up in your oppression to give us vision,

and unity in the battle against what is ALWAYS WRONG.

 

May all you dead here gathered, be to us this day

and ever more, family and loved ones.  May you forgive

our divisive deeds and show us a more excellent way. 

A way in which we might spread union and camaraderie

with all those at our left and right.  A path that leads to

understanding and collaboration amid the colorful nature

of our differences.  A journey toward liberty

and justice for each.

 

We enfold our hearts in yours.    Hold us now, as 

we hold you.   Think on us forgivingly, dear William. 

Published in WAYFARING Stranger, Wipf and Stock,  2023, pp. 46 - 48.

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