• Daniel Dahlquist has published multiple poetry collections, including Speech to the Dead People and Slow Dancing in Carbondale, and he is an editor for the poetry collection Geneseo Days by Marvin Kleinau. Daniel lives in Galena, IL with his wife Jeanette.

Reenacting the Civil War for Boy Scouts in the Home of Ulysses S. Grant

You can scarcely navigate the bridge into town
on that weekend in April busloads of Boy Scouts
arrive in Galena, Illinois, to join reenactors
in commemoration of the Civil War. The real Grant
was a nobody, working in his father’s leather store,
before he learned the art of war. His house looks
down upon the park where he’s cast in bronze,
and further still, to the well-groomed levee,
where Union soldiers lock and load the Springfield
musket with blanks, and boys look on with awe.
The Scouts learn how to dress, how to cook and
sew 1860s style, period-correct to the last stitch.
They learn to march and fold the flag, to treat
a wound in the authentic surgical tent, where
once men begged for mercy, and outside lay
arms and legs.