Please ping your lists to this thread.....
The Ride of the Brown Brigadier
Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the last minute ride of the Brown Brigadier,
On the 19th of January, in twenty oh nine;
Conservatives will say, this state is mine!
We’ll all remember that famous day and year.
Brown said to his friend, “If the Socialists march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,—
One if by cloture, and two if we’re free;
And I on the opposite shore we’ll be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm.”
Then he said “Good-night!” and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Obamacare Socialist man-of-war;
A phantom ship Kennedy, with each mast and spar
Across Massachusetts like a prison bar,
And in D.C. a fool, sat narcissfied
By Baruch Hussein’s own reflection, in the tide.
Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the Capital door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the Communists marched, trembling with fears,
Back down to their boats on the shore.
The Brown Brigadier, he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,—
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.
Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel’s tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, “All is well!”
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,—
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.
Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked the Brown Brigadier.
Now he patted his horse’s side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
Continued here:
http://brownbrigade.ning.com/