Robert Baylot
Field Amputation

The river runs past, not through, Vicksburg.
The National Military Park there
has monumental lessons and some
spill over into the city, leftovers not

Captured in the Park's confines:
a colonel's bust near the Sonic drive-in;
a cannon outside a drugstore, overlooking
a diversionary canal and not a strategic hill.

Maybe once, earlier in life, you played
soldier in the Park, picked pecans,
ran the hills and gullies
when city and park were intertwined.

Now Vicksburg and the Park lie apart,
the Park sawed away like a discarded
limb, one last Civil War surgery,
their once union now a footnote.

_ _

Robert Baylot has published poetry in Blackberry and Voices International. He holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Southern Mississippi and has worked for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at its engineering research facility in Vicksburg, Mississippi, as a technical editor, technology transfer specialist and center chief.

>> Back to Issue 20, 2017