Mystically inspired,
Amazingly patient, tireless suppliants for the vision
You have caught the ray of a true, a far distant light.
And these palaces and pillars let them crumble when they
their days have fulfilled.
For in mind and in soul you have agonized and struggled,
Until triumphantly you have evoked the very stones into
utterance.
And through that which decays you have spoken the eternal
and the undecaying thought.
* * * * *
Well done, master-minded builders.
For the world mind, geographically at least, it has conquered!
And through this miracle of color companioning the hosts of
the nations about the universe's court,
With a modern Prometheus banishing the night,
You are radiating the contagion of the triumph to the land
and the sea.
For looking southward in a vision--
The architects and sculptors have seen the first rush of the
hemispheric waters, victoriously intermingling.
And lo, the inspiration of an isthmian genius has here become
the inspiration and joy of a race.
* * * * *
And the races--
Hear the dialects, see the people--
Now catching the world thought they hunger for brotherhood.
And even while they laugh for brotherhood they pray
For they are groping
And inaudibly they are praying for more planetary builders,
To express the growing consciousness of the international
mind,
As here materially in stone and in mortar,
So invisibly in governments and a new world order,
And in a brotherhood, large minded and interracial in its
scope.
* * * * *
And we believe
That the God of the United Seas will hear their petition in
His way.
For as intently we gaze, we can see
That this apocalypse of light and color, directing upward
and sympathizing throng-ward
Prophesies that the races are divinely to be led into
essential unity.
* * * * *
And even more, O path-finders!
[B]We seem to see, the very pillars--emblematic of a holy shaft
of light--gathering here.
Radiating not only towards the skys;
But also hovering, hovering, hovering, as if preparing, when
the festive days are o'er.
To guide to democracy's sacred task across the highways of
the seas.