To America on July 4"

May you awake as your last hour
Ticks away a world that history
Will not recall except to yearn.
May you find in the memory

That here the rights of man were born,
The will to lift, at last, the light
Of reason–ever sentinel
Against the blind, despotic night.

And may you cry, as shadows come
Onrushing, how mankind saw
The kneeling rise–their sacrament
Nature alone and nature's law—

And seize, upon these shores, the prize
That man shall live by right, not leave
Of priest or king or mob of men
In guises power lust may weave.

May you call Enlightenment’s sons
From banishment and they again
Proclaim rebirth of mankind’s last,
Best hope. May freedom ring out, then,

Against sly tyranny that lusts
To forge our chains, chains to be hurled
To damnation everlasting
From the bitter shores of the world.

May no year come but skies this night
Explode with freedom’s grand old light.