The March: November 1864 - April 1865 Poem by Frank Avon

Sherman's March to the Sea
is no longer just a phrase.

It's a multitude
of faces and names,
faults and aims,
pine trees and pontoons,
surgeries and psyches and sex;
it's suffering
on all fronts,
mud and blood and mules,
sensitive hands
and stogies and brandy;
mansions and courthouses
and barns and pup tents;
it's a bayonet in the belly
and bullets and vomit.

It's not David and Bathsheba,
nor Lancelot and Guinevere
nor Romeo and Juliet,
but it could be, it could have been.

Its daylight and darkness,
moonlight and deep shade,
skirmishes and battles
and sieges and numbers
and numbers and numbers.

It's family and phrasing
and foraging and the tromp-tromp-tromp
of a century being born.

Sherman's march to the sea
will never be the same
and never was.
It's 'the devastating manufacture
of the bones of our sons,
a war after a war,
a war before a war.'

Be aware:
what was once just a phrase
said with a sneer
has emerged
as the swath of a year.