Sharpsburg. Kent Gramm

      Dunker Church, evening

      That evening I sat in the Dunker Church

      alone. Way off up cemetery way

      the bump, bump now and then of our guns sounded,

      and fainter, deeper, Yankee crews thumped back,

      their heavy shot whistling toward that graveyard.

      But birds still twittered in the trees around

      the meeting house. It was just a square room,

      as plain as biscuits on a clean-washed plate.

      Against the north wall stood a bare table,

      unpainted. On three sides, plank-backed benches.

      The floorboards and plain benches gave the dry

      rose smell of books a quiet schoolroom gives

      in deep late summer, after months of heat

      and standing empty in the afternoons.

      The whitewashed walls bore no adornment but

      the windows. What you see out such windows

      looks more sharply colored for those white walls—

      the clean walls, and that pure light of heaven—

      green trees through hand-washed glass clearer than water—

      and then some boys came in. They hushed at first

      and then broke into talk and I stood up

      and shuffled out. It was all right. I’d seen

      what heaven is. I’d felt it in my lungs

      and smelled it. This was what the great battle

      was fought for. This is what we all wanted.

      The battle’s center was the Dunker Church.

      Old Jack is Here

      When General Lee drew up his line behind

      Antietam Creek that early afternoon,

      we hadn’t but about fifteen thousand

      worn-out, hungry, angry men. The Old Man stood

      on Cemetery Hill, his hands still bandaged

      from a fall, which must have made him just mad,

      and looked across the middle bridge. He saw

      the Yankee army, or half of it, forty

      thousand, come down the Boonsboro Road, deploy

      three miles along the Creek, place artillery—

      some batteries of big twenty-pounders

      included—on the high ground. McClellan