Sandy Longhorn
Self-Guided Walk in a Park Built on Bloodied Ground, 9 Stations
~Prairie Grove Battlefield State Park
1
Replica Civil War split-rail fences
line the drive, demark the trailhead,
some 21st century sweat gone into authentication.
2
A mile loop of smooth asphalt runs
along the ridge, swoops down to river basin
and returns to shaded hilltop.
Dozens of residents make use of the trail,
leading leashed dogs and sweating
through workout gear.
3
Monument.
Confederate Major General Hindman.
Union Generals Blunt and Herron.
Three portraits caught in cast iron and silver patina
eyes facing away from the bloodied arena.
4
Herron’s troops engaged first.
The 19th Iowan and the 20th Wisconsin
routed by Hindman’s men in the slaughter pen
of the Borden family’s apple orchard.
Attack met with counter-attack.
Blunt’s might joined Herron and the pattern
replayed until depleted resources
forced Hindman’s retreat in the night.
5
Locals tended the wounded, bound the dead,
regardless of regimental colors, watched 4 houses
burn and an untallied number of captured Confederate
horses massacred on Union command.
6
60 years later, Caledonia Ann Borden,
9 at the time of the battle, maintained,
Well, we lived over it but I don’t have any love for a Yankee.
7
Passing the parking lot, a truck with gleaming
Confederate flag bumper stickers.
Gun rack empty.
8
Up on the ridge, a white oak so tall, so large around,
the rangers suspect it a witness tree.
9
Down near the spring a black walnut
and a hackberry merge, giants twined, mated.
The easy image of two sides healed,
made whole, but like the wind
through branches, the vision does not hold.
Song of Loblolly & Warblers
~White Oak Lake State Park
Alone on the trail, I’m surrounded
by towering trees and the loud calls
of pine warblers. In the gaps
there is silence and sunlight
and so much room to think.
Sometimes when I visit these parks
I am lonely. My therapist stresses
I change my syntax. Avoid
I am in favor of I feel
because feelings are fleeting.
The call of the pine warblers each to each
is fleeting but on repeat. I listen
alone as the wind through loblollies
lays down a soft beat. Later
when the ranger offers a map
to the little grand canyon,
I drive on a gravel road, alone,
into more warbling pines
to find a man in a truck.
I park and wait, want to ask
if I’ve found the right place,
but I am a woman alone. I feint
with my phone. Breathe easy again
when he leaves. I enter water-
carved sand and stone. Stopped
in my tracks by the marvel,
I sit to spend time in my head alone
listening to birds, trees, and the silent unknown.
Sandy Longhorn is the author of three books of poetry: The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, and Blood Almanac. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Central Arkansas.
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