- My name is Terrence P. Dwyer.

I'm an author and a playwright.

My poem is titled "American Soil."

"On the lower East Side, in an area known as Kleindeutschland, part of my family story began in 1847 when my great-grandfather drew his first breath in a tenement flat during a searing summer of typhus and crowded coffin ships arriving at South Street piers filled with escaping Irish citizens who sailed in steerage and landed in quarantine.

The first born in my New York City bloodline, after his father emigrated to avoid Prussian military service and government oppression.

He put on a Union Army uniform at 15 as a flag bearer for the 102nd Infantry Regiment and left lower Manhattan for Cedar Mountain, Virginia where half the regiment were either killed, wounded, or missing.

Too poor for any other way out of the teeming slums than to carry the colors into battle, he ran across fields, through woods, and up hills at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Missionary Ridge as one of Colonel Van Buren's city boys, then suffered a pass-through hip wound in the Battle Above the Clouds at Kennesaw Mountain.

Returning home at 17, he learned a trade, collected his war pension, joined the Grand Army of the Republic until expelled for not paying his dues, and raised three children, none of whom knew how to speak a word of German, but could recite every line of Whitman's 'I Hear America Singing.'

35 years after being wounded, his overworked heart gave out and he collapsed on the shop floor where he worked as a cabinetmaker and lived above as a tenant in a Cherry Street apartment, not far from the East Side flat he left as a boy to go fight for a place to be buried on American soil."

(gentle music)