Without history.(Poem)

 
WITHOUT HISTORY 
 
   I. 
 
   By their boots borne south, burdened by musket, 
   Cartridges, kit and the tug in the blood 
   That bound these Bluecoats to beat their way 
   Upstream till at last they gathered themselves 
   By the river in the woods near the white church 
 
   To see the Elephant, as they called battle, 
   And killed and got killed, as the leaded flail 
   Of the muskets scourged through the underbrush 
   And they lived of died there as they volleyed 
   Or else broke and ran and gathered beneath 
 
   The bluffs by the river. On the second day, 
   More killing. By sunset you could hear the birds 
   Again. Boats bore wounded back to Illinois 
   As other boats, unseen, barged the dead to points 
   As unknown as this field which isn't mine 
 
   To remember, just books, no faces, not 
   Even an ancestor there at Shiloh, 
   Who went later that year by boat, pulled by blood 
   From Kankakee near Chicago, on 
   From upstate Illinois down to Vicksburg. 
 
   II. 
 
   My Great-great Grandfather Shreffler, who went 
   South in the Fall of 1862, 
   Leaving borne, wife and son, scattered traces 
   That infer a life, whose family still spoke 
   Pennsylvania German. A name. No stories 
 
   About him at all, just a service record: 
   Enlisted, sent south into the Service 
   Under General Sherman, who fought for Grant 
   And Union at Vicksburg in Company B, 
   113th Illinois, in the First 
 
   Brigade of the Second Division of 
   The Fifteenth Army Corps of the Army of 
   The Tennessee, all precisely written down, 
   As exact as a street address, telling me 
   ...