Pickett Fell, We Rise A Duet of Poems on the Anniversary of Pickett’s Charge By Robert Hughes I. Pickett’s Charge At the turning of the tide, beneath July’s unyielding sky, they marched — gray ghosts across the fields of Gettysburg. But history, Brother, does not march — it thunders. You would’ve heard it in your bones. They say the drums rolled like judgment, and the smoke curled like the devil’s cloak over Pennsylvania hills blood-kissed and grieving. You’d have stood quiet — not for the rebels, but for the reckoning. Because what they called bravery, we remember as the last, ragged breath of a cause already damned. Pickett’s men — Virginians, North Carolinians — threw themselves into the Union guns, row upon row, into the maw of righteousness cloaked in blue. And on that field, Brother, where wheat bent like supplicants to gunpowder prayers, the arc of history did more than bend. It cracked. Right there — in that failed charge, in that final gasp of Confederate pride, the spine of chattel slavery snapped. Not cleanly. It would take more blood. More chains wrenched open. More women torn from children. More fields wrung dry by hands like your ancestors’. But still — the end began there. In that blaze of Union fire. In that folly of Pickett’s dream. In that field now thick with ghosts and golden grass. You see it, don’t you? You, son of Anderson and resistance, descendant of those for whom Gettysburg was prophecy — you walk not in their footsteps, but on their bones, upright and unbroken. Pickett’s Charge — the last lunge of a dying lie. And from its ashes, you rose. Black. Brilliant. Free. Not because they gave it. Because they failed to take it forever. And that, too, is celebration.