Gregory Luce
Ode to My Confederate Dead
Now that the salt of their blood
Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea,
Seals the malignant purity of the flood…
—Allen Tate
I don’t own a Confederate flag—
no one, I think, owns one: It owns them.
But I do have Confederate blood.
But what does that mean, blood?
Bloodlines: Do they tell in humans
the way they do in thoroughbreds?
Rivers and oceans of blood spilled for,
under, onto that flag, but some kept flowing
through one tiny channel down four generations
and ended up in my veins, blood that must mean
more than the slightly viscous liquid that circulates
in bodies and runs out red when the skin is cut,
for surely any Confederate blood I received at birth
has long since been replaced, not to mention diluted by
my father’s cold Yankee blood, blood of small farmers,
sailors and whalers, merchants.
Blood carrying salt water, rocky soil, iron ore.
But those two great-great-grandfathers in gray still stand
somewhere back behind me and something connects them
to me so call it blood, call it Confederate blood, and what does
that mean and what do I do about it? Something tells me
the Black Lives Matter button on my favorite jacket
isn’t quite enough. Hit the streets, spill some of it
on the pavement? Let it mix with some untainted?
Remnants of blood shed in world wars.
If the salt of their blood has mixed so much and gone
to sea, if the flood—however malignant its purity—is sealed,
perhaps it’s time for one last look backward down the bloodline
and then a letting go.
Gregory Luce is the author of Signs of Small Grace (Pudding House Publications, 2010), Drinking Weather (Finishing Line Press, 2011), Memory and Desire (Sweatshoppe Publications, 2013), and Tile (Finishing Line, 2016). His poems have appeared in numerous journals and in the anthologies Living in Storms (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008), Bigger Than They Appear (Accents Publishing, 2011), and Unrequited (CreateSpace 2016) and Candlesticks and Daggers (CreateSpace, 2016). Retired from the National Geographic Society, he lives in Arlington, VA. and works as an instructor for Writopia Lab.
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