Jake Diefer is with the assault that comes from the ships, He has marched, he has fought at Fair Oaks, but he looks the same: A slow-thought-chewing Clydesdale horse of a man Who doesn’t think much of the way that they farm down here, The sun may be good, if you like that sort of sun, But the barns and the fields are different, they don’t look right, They don’t look like Pennsylvania. He spits and wonders. Whenever he can, he reads a short, crumpled letter And tries to puzzle out from the round, stiff writing How things are back on the farm. The boy’s a good boy But the boy can’t do it all, or the woman either. He knows too much about weather and harvest-hands —It’s all right fighting the Rebels to save the Union But they ought to get through with it quicker, now they’ve begun, They don’t take the way the crops are into account, You can’t go off and leave a farm like a store, And you can’t expect a boy to know everything,