THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 26, 1995 TAG: 9505250213
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 09 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JO-ANN CLEGG, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
It was, more than anything else, the irony that touched J.L. ``Les'' Atkins and inspired him to write the poem ``Hollywood Cemetery-Richmond, Virginia'' which took the first place award for poetry in this year's Christopher Newport University writing contest.
``I went up there to the cemetery last Veterans Day, Nov. 11,'' Atkins said, ``and it just hit me. There were 18,000 unknown Confederate dead buried there with just a single cannon to mark the spot. We have a tomb up in Arlington built for just one unknown and there in Richmond we have 18,000 of them.''
To add to the irony, the 18,000 were casualties of one of the most memorialized of all Civil War battles, that which occurred when Meade's Union troops met Lee's Confederates at Gettysburg during the first three days of July 1863.
When Lee withdrew to Virginia, the dead were, of necessity, left behind. Shortly after the war ended Confederate veterans asked for permission to return to Gettysburg to retrieve the bodies, which had been buried in unmarked bags in shallow trenches.
Permission was granted and the young men of the Confederacy were brought home to rest at last in Southern soil.
In the early 1870s, nearly 50 years before the Tomb of the Unknowns was built in Arlington National Cemetery, the section of the Richmond cemetery that holds those who fell at Gettysburg was dedicated to their memory.
Yet on the late fall day when the country traditionally honors veterans of all wars, Atkins and his wife, Lucille, were the only visitors.
That, he felt, was another irony.
``Up in Arlington there are great ceremonies each year, often with the President in attendance, but (in Richmond) there was nothing,'' he said.
To Atkins, whose grandmother was a Civil War widow, the graves in Hollywood Cemetery represented not 18,000 unidentified bodies, but 18,000 young men, each of whom had meant a great deal to someone.
That thought was the inspiration for the award-winning poem by Atkins, a retired corporate manager and accomplished poet.
The haunting words and thoughts impressed the judges in the Christopher Newport contest.
``A quietly powerful poem in protest of the prodigious waste of war,'' they wrote in a critique which praised both the message and the tone of the poem.
``A stark black finger of cannon points out the way to the central irony: that the so-called nameless dead, far from being `Known Only to God,' were in reality living, breathing individuals, known, loved . . . only deemed anonymous by the faceless state they served,'' the judges concluded.
For Atkins, the award for the poem is welcome but he prefers to downplay the role of the poet.
``The poem, like a statue, is important,'' he said. ``The poet isn't. It's like the great statues of ancient Rome. People are impressed when they see them today, but they have no idea, nor does it matter, who the sculptor was.'' MEMO: This poem took the first-place award for poetry in this year's
Christopher Newport University Writing contest.
ILLUSTRATION: Photo by JO-ANNE CLEGG
To Les Atkins, whose grandmother was a Civil War widow, the graves
in Hollywood Cemetery represented not 18,000 unidentified bodies,
but 18,000 young men, each of whom had meant a great deal to
someone.
"HOLLYWOOD CEMETERY-RICHMOND, VIRGINIA"
I stand in a hollow circle of crimson leaves
Swirling from behind a lovely broken tomb.
The reverent silence is shattered by a shrill bird.
Whose single strident voice argues squatter's rights.
With a cackly group of possessive graveyard crows.
A formation line of rich green holly trees salute me.
As they march past white rows of numbered marker stones.
Their leafy banners wave in perfect form with feasting roots.
Buried in the rotted corpses dressed in molding leather boots.
A single black cannon's muzzle points to the memorial zones.
Marking this site of many forgotten battle bones.
There Rests Eighteen Thousand Confederate Dead, Known Only to
God.
The sign deceives. Here are eighteen thousand gathered brothers
Known intimately also, to eighteen thousand grieving mothers.
- J.L. ``Les'' Atkins
by CNB