Day of the Dead: Antietam
I heard a call that said something was for me at Antietam. I listened. We went.
The violence is embedded in the land. The cries of the dead are still there-- just existing on another frequency. Like turning the dial of a radio-- from static to station-- you can still hear them.
23000. Died. Injured. Missing.
We walked the corn field where the bloodiest battle took place.
The field had just been reaped. Knowing what happened on that land brought a different context to the harvest. The crushed stalks and red cobs read like fallen bodies and blood. We saw the violence in it.
This dirt has been drenched in blood.
Although we heard nothing but silence and wind, we knew how deafening it must have been to take it in. What it must have been to hear so many men screaming for help or being with their agony. Understanding it conceptually is so different than having a role as it plays out.
There is a sycamore tree by the Burnside bridge that is called a "witness tree" because it is what remains after everything else has gone.
The tree was young when the battle happened. It witnessed 600 people get killed in near point-blank range. It watched as the bodies got stacked and the water ran red.
There is a place in the tree where it splits-- one trunk divided into two. The division that happened between the North and South played out in the nation, played out in this tree. It may have been whole once but death kept it forever divided. Maybe it decided on that day-- the bloodiest day in US history-- to change course.
There are record keepers among us. They still hold the stories of the land. They mark severe passages in time. They are vortexes.
I'm left wondering, what happens to places like this?
The impact and blow is obvious the minute you walk the land. The brutality is forever linked to the place (and weirdly juxtaposed by the gorgeousness of rolling hills and its resting place between mountain ranges). It felt haunted by memory and sadness. The depth and breadth of it all.
A living prayer for remembrance and a grateful thanks to our friend @tdotgrott for the encouragement and love he shares for our history
