By Walt Garlington
The Confederate States
Neither denied the Holy Trinity
Nor Christ’s divinity.
They rejected the stumbling blocks
Of cold deism
And wild pantheism.
They never invaded
Another country’s land
To pillage all near to hand.
Those gentlemen did not
Carpet-bomb a town
Or nuke Asian ground.
No one can accuse them
Of starvation of civilians
By economic sanctions,
Of launching regime change ops,
Or forcing same-sex weddings
On the unwilling.
As reward for this innocence,
Dixie’s folk must pledge allegiance
To the Yankee imperium,
Bowing in delirium
To the brutes who did these crimes,
And cursing their own fathers for all time.
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor of the website Confiteri: A Southern Perspective.
Here’s a Memorial Day essay of mine from 2021 that I’m confident y’all will enjoy. Also, the feature image comes from another blog post about when my sons and I visited Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery back in 2017. Like the bold Southern thinker and theologian Robert Lewis Dabney so rightly opined, “You have no reason to be ashamed of your Confederate dead. See to it that they have no reason to be ashamed of you.” In conclusion, I leave you with a section of the Orthodox Akathist for the Repose of the Departed. May you and yours have a blessed Memorial Day, and may the Lord have mercy on us all. – DM
Kontakion 8
The whole world is a common sacred cemetery, in every place is the dust of our fathers and brethren. O Christ our God Who alone lovest us unchangeably, forgive all that have died from the beginning until now, that they may sing with boundless love: Alleluia!
Comments
Like many in the SCV, I spent Friday afternoon/early evening placing flags at the graves of our veterans of The Late Unpleasantness in a couple of our prominent old cemeteries here in Clarksville. On Saturday, then, I made my own rounds of old family cemeteries, from Dickson, through Humphreys, and finally Stewart County.
I still hear “Thank you for your service” from folks when they learn that I’m a veteran – and I’m grateful, as far as it goes, knowing it comes from a good place – but I’m still a bit uncomfortable, knowing there’s nothing I, or any of us who served in Iraq (Indeed, much of the late GWOT!) did to “. . . support and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic”, nor to really defend our kith and kin. But when I go to those graves of our Confederate forebears, I feel both gratitude and envy: gratitude indeed for their service; envy because they TRULY were defending their homes and families!
Thanks to you, DM, and Mr. Garlington for this!
BTW, I purchased my own copy of The Honourable Cause. I’m only about a couple of chapters into it, but I’ve loved what I’ve read thus far. Thank you all for your work!
Gratitude and blessings,
David Smith
Author
DD, you always word things so well. What a God-honoring way to honor our Confederate forebears and your ancestors! While the left & all the institutions attack their memory, monuments, graves, and even their bodies, they can never take from us truth. and it is I you so rightly said it. God bless you, friend!