Captain Orlando Killion

Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,         You dauntless fledglings         Who pass by my headstone,         Mock not its record of my captaincy in the army         And my faith in God!         They are not denials of each other.         Go by reverently, and read with sober care         How a great people, riding with defiant shouts         The centaur of Revolution,         Spurred and whipped to frenzy,         Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the sea         Over the precipice they were nearing,         And fell from his back in precipitate awe         To celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.         Moved by the same sense of vast reality         Of life and death, and burdened as they were         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?