Poems ✍️

TWO Swede families live downstairs and an Irish policeman upstairs, and an old
soldier, Uncle Joe.
Two Swede boys go upstairs and see Joe. His wife is dead, his only son is dead,
and his two daughters in Missouri and Texas don't want him around.
The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer on the bottom of a flatiron
while the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.
Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, how the Union
soldiers crept in rain somewhere a dark night and ran forward and killed many
Rebels, took flags, held a hill, and won a victory told about in the histories in
school.
Joe takes a piece of carpenter's chalk, draws lines on the floor and piles stove
wood to show where six regiments were slaughtered climbing a slope.
'Here they went' and 'Here they went,' says Joe, and the January wind howls and
the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.
The two Swede boys go downstairs with a big blur of guns, men, and hills in their
heads. They eat herring and potatoes and tell the family war is a wonder and
soldiers are a wonder.
One breaks out with a cry at supper: I wish we had a war now and I could be a
soldier.