| |
| THEY tell me my spirit’s departed, | |
| That my body of soul is bereft; | |
| And that barren ’midst strangers I wander | |
| And that no inspiration is left | |
| But my vanishing fires ancestral | 5 |
| Where the last faint flashes are seen, | |
| And that like to the poor and the stranger, | |
| What is left by the world I glean. | |
| |
| They tell me, not knowing my Spirit | |
| Like an ember that never grows cold, | 10 |
| Tho’ smouldering in its own ashes | |
| Yet murmurs and grows as of old. | |
| Oh, my Spirit awaits but my seeking | |
| To burst like a spring from the soil, | |
| And if once it be free from confinement | 15 |
| It will vest in all fruit of my toil. | |
| |
| It will live in the colors on canvas, | |
| And survive in the hewn marble plan, | |
| And in song and in music and story | |
| To the last generation of man. | 20 |
| It will speak from the lips of new Prophets, | |
| And their truth from the heights will be hurled, | |
| From a model city of Justice | |
| Where its flag will blazon unfurled. | |
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