Useless, Useless

The swamp keeps its own counsel.

It does not applaud.

It does not hiss.

It only swallows hoofprints and the fever of men.

He rides with a broken leg and an unbroken delusion,

splinted pride bound tight with strips of torn ambition.

The night smells of mud and cordite memory.

Every snapping twig is a Union psalm.

He had wanted a stage.

Gaslight. Velvet.

A nation stunned into breathless recognition.

Sic semper tyrannis—

a line rehearsed for history’s bright proscenium.

Instead: pine needles in his hair,

a doctor’s whispered pity,

the metallic taste of milk gone sour in his canteen.

The Confederacy already a ghost

refusing to rise on cue.

Newspapers call him fiend, madman, assassin.

He mouths martyr.

But the swamp does not debate.

It receives his boots like any other boots.

It cools his grand declarations

into steam that vanishes by morning.

“Useless, useless,”

he mutters—not of himself

but of the cause that failed to ignite the countryside,

of Maryland’s silence,

of farmers who bar their doors

against a legend with a pistol.

He had believed in sparks.

Believed the shot would bloom

into banners and bonfires,

that Richmond would resurrect itself

from one theatrical thunderclap.

Instead: the slow arithmetic of consequence.

Horses collapsing.

Friends thinning.

A nation hardening its jaw.

In the tobacco barn’s dark ribcage

he feels the world narrowing to slats of light.

Dawn threads through the boards

like indifferent fingers.

They call to him to surrender.

He thinks of Shakespeare—

of Brutus, of tyrants and crowns—

forgets that tragedies end

with bodies cooling on the floor

while the state survives the speech.

Flame licks the hay.

Smoke rehearses his epitaph.

“Useless, useless,”

the fire seems to say now,

chewing through the last illusions.

Not the Union.

Not the war.

But this small, frantic man

who mistook murder for meaning.

Dragged into morning,

eyes searching for an audience,

he finds only sky—

vast, unresponsive, blue.

History will keep the President.

It will keep the wound, the widow, the vigil.

It will keep the long work of mending.

Of him, it will keep a footnote

and a farmhouse turned to ash,

and two words drifting up

with the smoke—

useless, useless.