A red badge of courage <br />Or a red badge of death, <br />Mangled, strangled, missing limbs <br />Balls and powder mingling skin. <br />The haunting horror of it all. <br /> <br />Reynolds death and Ewels shame <br />The wheat field, Devils Den, the hills <br />To the north, Cemetery and Kulps. <br />Little Round Top’s barely hidden <br />Buckets of blood. <br />The fields weeping insanely with anguish. <br />And then Picket’s charge with cannons, <br />And muskets, smoking and firing, <br /> Firing, firing, firing. <br />And thousands, and thousands and thousands <br />Of gray and blue boys dead. <br />And more who were mangled and strangled, <br />And went missing limbs. <br /> <br />And as horrible as the horror there, <br />The fishhook would not be the last assaulted. <br />There would be the Wilderness, and Cold Harbor, <br />The bloody angel, and Petersburg’s’ crater. <br />It would be the Death Angel’s own harvest. <br />And it would be bloody, <br />It would be war.<br /><br />Sandra Osborne<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/gettysburg-postscript/
