Gettysburg Bullets

Gettysburg Bullets

An Ode to Lincoln

11/7/06

Battlefields are humbling.

Here stands a humbled man.

He's tall and quiet; he's orderly.

Don’t deny it, ‘cause he's ahead.

How much power? I do not know,

But he'll change us all forever.

He never knew what he’d do.

Death was much too clever.

But for now he stands upon this ground

Where many men have died.

He suddenly bursts out in speech,

A hush falls on the crowd.

“Not one,” he says, “will remember me,

Nor what we’ve ever done.

Nor will words be remembered,

From this speech that has begun.”

How wrong he was when he spoke,

Too wrong to comprehend.

Later, they say, he sat down

To watch the curtain descend–

A young man, just 26,

determined and misread.

–This young man crept behind

And put a bullet in his head.

It wasn’t long before our

Dearest president was dead…

Wrote this when I was 16.  Guess what we were discussing in American History.