Bronze monuments shift
from chocolate-brown to green.
The grand warriors on foot or horseback
are keenly honed,
grim and hawk-like,
unblinking in the eye of the foe.
They are all sharp hooves
and pointed blades
and mustaches
dripping with Tuesday's rain.
The Sixtieth Street bus is indifferent
to their fierceness.
The rain drips from their noses
in parks, on boulevards, in cemeteries,
on the ground where they and their comrades bled.
They stand sentinel in all weathers,
silently guarding the republic
with a gaze no iconoclastic pigeon can divert.
Colonel Heg peers down King Street.
The rising sun glinting on Lake Monona
fills his eye with gold.
The men he led, the people he liberated,
his wife and children are gone.
His image is all that remains.
We are thus reminded
that slavery and hate and peonage
must be resisted.
If we forget this truth,
the glory of their saber-blades is tarnished
with filth far worse than pigeon shit.