When I was small, a woman died;
Today her only boy
Went up from the Potomac,
His face all victory
 
To look at her.  How slowly
The seasons must have turned,
Till bullets clipped an angle
And he passed quickly round.
 
If pride shall be in paradise,
Ourself cannot decide;
Of their imperial conduct
No person testified.
 
But proud in apparition,
That woman and her boy
Pass back and forth before my brain,
As even in the sky
 
I'm confident that bravos
Perpetual break abroad
For braveries remote as this
In scarlet Maryland.