Their carven words all testify
Of then and now and future time
That these were they who kept the cause
Was given them by fathers past
And living still in coursing blood.

They token men
True to lineage.
To sons they left high honour and the land,
A legacy of action speaking still.

Let stone forever warn
The men who sit in marble halls
That sires are only seeming dead.
They hover near in grey embattled lines
Beneath thorn pennon’s scarlet flash;
And principles remain
Beyond their flesh and ours,
Beyond the stone.

Memorial Day, 2021


James Everett Kibler

James Everett Kibler is a novelist, poet, and Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he taught popular courses in Southern literature, examining such figures as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Wendell Berry, and Larry Brown. Born and raised in upcountry South Carolina, Kibler spends much of his spare time tending to the renovation of an 1804 plantation home and the reforestation of the surrounding acreage. This home served as the subject of his first book, Our Fathers’ Fields: A Southern Story, for which he was awarded the prestigious Fellowship of Southern Writers Award for Nonfiction in 1999 and the Southern Heritage Society’s Award for Literary Achievement.

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