I.
I do not see I do much good, but I cannot leave.
Some youngster holds on to me convulsively.
I do what I can: stop with him, sit near for hours.
II.
The Brooklyn frost of Dec 16, ’62
crowded the Whitman family windows.
On North Portland Avenue, I snatched up
the Tribune, laid it flat
on the kitchen table for us
to scan the list of regimental casualties.
Under the 51st New York, First Lieutenant
G. W. Whitmore, Company D.
Make quick with the day—I packed clothes,
notebooks, fifty dollars from mother’s savings.
Visualizing the horror I perceived at Broadway Hospital,
I knew all too well—my brother’s amputation—
performed by a doctor ill-versed in the tearing
& cutting of flesh to bone. I hurried to Washington D.C.,
trekking to the Mall’s northern edge: a stagnant canal
borders up against Armory Square devastation.
My brother? Have you seen my brother?
Dead cats, broken whiskey bottles floated
on the fetid surface. I threw my head back.
I write Mother: Trying to get information, trying
to get access to big people. These eyes arrived
in Virginia to a Camp Hospital on the banks
of the Rappahannock, only the worst cases.
I pressed my frazzled hand into George’s.
Remember your galliant Son is a Capting.
A shell fragment gashed through his check:
a soldier’s scratch. He’d seen the elephant.
III.
The wounded lie on the frozen ground,
lucky if their blankets spread on layers of pine
or hemlock twigs or small leaves. No cots; seldom
even a mattress. At the foot of a tree, I perceive a heap
of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands; a full load
for a one-horse cart. In the dooryard towards the river—
fresh graves—their names on pieces of barrel-staves
or broken board, stuck in the dirt. I cannot go back
to Brooklyn. My place is here.
Reference
Whitman, Walt. Memoranda During the War: Civil War Journals, 1863 — 1865. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2010. 5 – 6. Print.