Reenactment

Playing games in the cemetery,
grownups in blue and gray,
here and there a ruffled shirt,
top hat, a few little girls
in dresses, celebrating R.E. Lee,
not so popular where I grew up,
damn Yankee I will forever be,
one you can trust, someone said,
better not, I may disappoint
smelly, mothballed wool.


"Rebel flags give me the creeps," says Virginia.

"I guess you didn't see many in Manhattan," I say.

"No, we had other distractions," says she, "like Nixon in China."

[Note: Nixon in China is an opera by American composer John Adams and librettist Alice Goodman.]