Captain Orlando KillionOh, you young radicals and dreamers,You dauntless fledglingsWho pass by my headstone,Mock not its record of my captaincy in the armyAnd my faith in God!They are not denials of each other.Go by reverently, and read with sober careHow a great people, riding with defiant shoutsThe centaur of Revolution,Spurred and whipped to frenzy,Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the seaOver the precipice they were nearing,And fell from his back in precipitate aweTo celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.Moved by the same sense of vast realityOf life and death, and burdened as they wereWith 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?
Oh, you young radicals and dreamers,You dauntless fledglingsWho pass by my headstone,Mock not its record of my captaincy in the armyAnd my faith in God!They are not denials of each other.Go by reverently, and read with sober careHow a great people, riding with defiant shoutsThe centaur of Revolution,Spurred and whipped to frenzy,Shook with terror, seeing the mist of the seaOver the precipice they were nearing,And fell from his back in precipitate aweTo celebrate the Feast of the Supreme Being.Moved by the same sense of vast realityOf life and death, and burdened as they wereWith 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?