Read Poetry: Battle Cry, by Karlyle Tomms

I found an old brass button in my back yard.
It once adorned a Union soldier’s uniform,
And lay among the blades of grass almost a hundred and fifty years.
It waited patiently, finally to be discovered.
How many times had I stepped over it, or mowed past it, never to notice?
I had lived on the property for ten years, and there it lay the whole time,
But there it lay for all the previous years combined.
I picked it up to see the eagle still proudly spreading wings beneath the clustered bits of dirt,
And realized, I may have been the first to touch it
Since the soldier whose uniform it once embellished last pushed it into the button hole.
Likely, he had camped on this ground.
My house, over a hundred years old, was not standing then.
This hillside was likely pasture rolling up above the county…