Day: March 22, 2017

The Sunken Road

From U.S. Park Service:
Introduction
This farm lane served as a breastwork for the Con­federate center. For about three hours 2,200 Confederates, later reinforced by ad­ditional troops, held off the attacks of a combined Union force numbering nearly 10,000. Finally, just after noon, this thin gray line collapsed and fell back several hundred yards to the Piper Farm. The Union attackers had suffered too many casualties to pursue their advantage. Seeing the dead in the road an observer wrote, “They were lying in rows like the ties of a rail­road, in heaps like cordwood mingled with the splintered and shattered fence rails. Words are inadequate to portray the scene.”
A Simple Farm Lane Changed Forever
During the early hours of the battle, Col. John Brown Gordon promised Robert E. Lee: “These men are going to stay here, General, till the sun goes down or victory is won.” The Confederate troops that Gordon commanded were part of a well protected line of over 2,200 men hunkered down behind piled-up fence rails in this well worn sunken road.

When the Federal attacks shifted south at approximately 9:30 a.m., the Confederates held their fire until the last possible second. Then, as Gordon remembered, “My rifles flamed and roared in the Federals’ faces like a blinding blaze of lightning…the entire line, with few exceptions, went down in the consuming blast.”

For more than three hours thousands of men blazed away at each other at point-blank range. Eventually the overwhelming Union numbers and confusion in the Confederate ranks forced the defenders back. When the fighting subsided, 5,500 soldiers lay dead or wounded on the field and in the road. That number included Col. Gordon, who had been hit five different times. After the deadly struggle for this sunken road, soldiers who fought here described it as the “road of death” and a “ghastly flooring.” From that day forward, the road has been known as Bloody Lane.

“Heaps Upon Heaps Were There in Death’s Embrace”
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Love After Love

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott (1930 – 2017)

A native of the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, Walcott was one of the most decorated of modern poets and playwrights. A winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature, he began writing in his teens, attended the University of Jamaica and moved to Trinidad to teach. He was hired by Boston University in 1981 and was awarded a MacArthur Foundation Grant the same year. He later taught at the University of Alberta, (Canada) and the University of Essex, (England). Thrice married, thrice divorced, Walcott had two daughters. He died last week in St. Lucia.

I heard Tom Hiddleston read this on NPR last Sunday and wished my radio had a repeat button.

Greg Bover

news from Joe Ciolino:

Business Owners comprising the Gloucester Downtown Association are looking to hire a new paid coordinator for the 2017 Sidewalk Bazaar.  John Orlando who has done a great job for many years  is now stepping down to concentrate on his own business, The Harbor View Inn . If anyone is interested  in the job, which does pay, please contact  Joe Ciolino (The Weathervane 978-281-1227)  or Patty Gates (Premier Imprints 978-282-3227)to learn more and to meet to discuss the job description.

Thanks,
Joe Ciolino GDA Director

Late morning sunrise on Monday, the first day of Spring.   Took a little extra time for the sun to reach it’s way over the low cloud bank.

Which one speaks to you?