Twenty Years After - Timeless Poem

Twenty Years After
191
I

“Grandpa,” a rosy schoolboy said,
His eager face aglow,
Why is to-day a holiday,
And all the streets below
Crowded with joyful folk, who march
With rose-wreathed spades and picks,
With Bear flags, and great banners
Marked ‘Six, and Twenty-six?’

“Why are the bands all playing,
‘Mid soldiers mile on mile?
And long, long lines of carriages
Of gray-haired men, who smile
At those that hail them as they pass,
And strew with flowers their way?
Why do they cheer as though the world
Ne’er saw so great a day?”

III

“It is a wondrous story, lad,
Just twenty years have gone
Since we who lived in Nineteen Six,
On such an April morn
As this, endured the direst fate
That all Time’s records tell,
When all the sky was lurid flame,-
The earth a blazing hell!

“When woe and horror-want and fea
With death walked hand in hand,
When mother’s wail o’er homeless babe
Filled all the stricken land
And famine grew-’till from yon hills
The watchers wan could spy
The smoky flags of rescue rise
From out the Eastern sky!

“Ah! boy, to me that awful time
A nightmare still doth seem
And what I see to-day appears
No less a wondrous dream,–
In which these palaces of trade,
That mark our city’s might,
Were reared by a magician’s wand
Created in a night

“For greater than our cruel loss
Were those great hearts of yore,
Who, even as the ruin spread,
Clasped hands above and swore
That they, sons of the Pioneers,
The children of the Bear,-
Would build above that dreary waste
A city still more fair!

VII

“And so, as brothers should, they toiled,
The rich and poor were one,
No fear, no faltering, was there From rise to set of sun
The grumbler found по listener,
The drone no neighbor’s cheer,
No craven heart among the men,
The women shed no tear

VIII

“And they who fled in coward rout,
When skulking back they came,
Met naught from we who wrought save jests
To mock their load of shame
While up-still up!-the city rose
From blackened wall and sod,
From the first brick to the last brick
All shoulders bore the hod
“And California, fairest
Of all the States of earth,
Leaned from her ermine vestured throne
And watched her child’s new birth
And from her vales of fruit and vine,
Her hills of coffered gold
Poured out to speed the giant task
Her cheer and wealth untold

“Till San Francisco, Queen that was,
Her scepter grasped again
And, thron’d on her seven hills,
An Empress now doth reign,
To mark, borne by her vassal sea,
The Orient’s priceless freight,
The North and South lands’ argosies
Enter her Golden Gate

“Ah! ’tis the bravest story, lad,
That e’er was writ or sung,
And round the whole great globe to-day ”
Tis told in every tongue
You’ll find, my boy, in every land
To which your steps may roam,
A royal welcome waits for him
Who calls your birthplace home”