Captain Orlando Killion

Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,

You dauntless

Who pass by my headstone,

Mock not its record of my captaincy in the

And my faith in God!

They are not denials of each other.

Go by reverently, and read with sober

How a great people, riding with defiant

The centaur of Revolution,

Spurred and whipped to frenzy,

Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the

Over the precipice they were nearing,

And fell from his back in precipitate

To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.

Moved by the same sense of vast

Of life and death, and burdened as they

With the fate of a race,

How was I, a little blasphemer,

Caught in the drift of a nation's unloosened flood,

To remain a blasphemer,

And a captain in the army?