Meeting Of The Pickets
by Mrs. Frank Thompson
The years creep swiftly by, Friend G.;
We are on the same old spot,
Just where we met in sixty-three
Mid shells and balls and shot.
Two armies slept beneath the stars,
Two sentinels trudged their way,
You wore a suit of blue that night,
And I a coat of gray.
The place has greatly changed since then;
No smoke bedims our sight;
No groans of pain come from the men,
As after the first day’s fight;
No clash of arms rings in our ears;
No dead men round us lie.
You’ve changed your suit of blue, old friend;
My jacket of gray’s laid by.
Tall monuments are standing round
Where brave men fought and died
On Chickamauga’s battle-ground.
They fell on every side,
Mid the booming of the guns
And the shells which plowed their way
Through the bodies of the men in blue
And the soldiers in the gray.
The snows of two and thirty years
Have melted here in sorrow
On Chickamauga’s stains and blur
Of blood and strife and horror,
Where the aged and the young alike
Were butchered in the fray.
Near the foot of Mission Ridge they fell,
And died in blue and gray.
That night the throbbing stars shone down
On the lonely picket’s head,
On our dreary, dark, and gloomy round,
And the faces of the dead.
On mangled forms and pallid lips,
On life ebbing slowly away,
Pierced by balls and torn with shells
Were the men in blue and gray.
And here, beneath the weathered leaves,
Our friends and foes are laid;
They’ve crossed the river, their swords are sheathed,
They are resting under the shade.
While we, at Chickamauga Park,
Have met again to-day
To dedicate the untimely graves
Of the dead in blue and gray.
