[From _Miami Woods, A Golden Wedding, and Other Poems_
(Cincinnati, 1881)]
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
Stout-hearted dames were they;
With nerve to wield the battle-brand,
And join the border fray.
Our rough land had no braver
In its days of blood and strife--
Aye ready for severest toil,
Aye free to peril life.
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
On old Kentucky's soil,
How shared they, with each dauntless band,
War's tempest, and life's toil!
They shrank not from the foeman,
They quail'd not in the fight,
But cheer'd their husbands through the day,
And soothed them through the night.
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
_Their_ bosoms pillow'd Men;
And proud were they by such to stand
In hammock, fort, or glen;
To load the sure old rifle--
To run the leaden ball--
To watch a battling husband's place,
And fill it should he fall.
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
Such were their daily deeds:
Their monument--where does it stand?
Their epitaph--who reads?
No braver dames had Sparta--
No nobler matrons Rome--
Yet who or lauds or honors them,
Ev'n in their own green home?
The mothers of our Forest-Land!
They sleep in unknown graves;
And had they borne and nursed a band
Of ingrates, or of slaves,
They had not been more neglected!
But their graves shall yet be found,
And their monuments dot here and there
"The Dark and Bloody Ground!"