Bite It, Punk — The Vehicle

Holding to the Great Form

All pass away.

They pass away unharmed, resting in Great Peace

Tao Te Ching

(for my dad; I love you. Thanks for all the

memories and my love of history)

It is all still here, in the stink hot middle of July.

The open fields and dirt roads that make up the crossroads town.

Walking it nearly takes us back in time to those days in early July.

When the corn fields drank blood

And the peaches upon limbs turned crimson.

Along the fighting lines we would have heard dying men’s cries,

The rapport of rifles and the gong of cannons,

The neigh and whinny and hoofbeats of horses,

The shouts of orders mingled with death,

And trumpets call in reply, by now the drummers have stopped their cadence.

The fresh summer air is tarnished with sweat, dust, and fouled britches,

Of powder, of blood, so thick we can taste it.

The Round Top twins still hold some surprises,

They still find lead in trees atop them.

Cemetery Hill still booms with ethereal cannon shot.

And along Pickett’s charge if we strain,

We may still hear the screams now ghostly whispers,

Of the men that breached the Union line.

To walk this place, as Lincoln said, is hallowed ground,

To walk this place, even in imagination now, is to remember you.

Raymond is a writer from the farmlands of south-central Illinois. This is his first publication.