A Wreath Of Immortelles

Judge Sawyer, whom in vain the people tried
To push from power, here is laid aside.
Death only from the bench could ever start
The sluggish load of his immortal part.
____
For those this mausoleum is erected
Who Stanford to the Upper House elected.
Their luck is less or their promotion slower,
For, dead, they were elected to the Lower.
____
Rash mortal! stay thy feet and look around-
This vacant tomb as yet is holy ground;
But soon, alas! Jim Fair will occupy
These premises-then, holiness, good-bye!
____
George Perry here lies stiff and stark,
With stone at foot and stone at head.
His heart was dark, his mind was dark-
“Ignorant ass!” the people said.
Not ignorant but skilled, alas,
In all the secrets of his trade:
He knew more ways to be an ass
Than any ass that ever brayed.

by Ambrose Bierce

Adair Welcker, Poet

The Swan of Avon died-the Swan
Of Sacramento’ll soon be gone;
And when his death-song he shall coo,
Stand back, or it will kill you too.

by Ambrose Bierce

An Inscription

A conqueror as provident as brave,
He robbed the cradle to supply the grave.
His reign laid quantities of human dust:
He fell upon the just and the unjust.

by by Ambrose Bierce

Another Way

I lay in silence, dead. A woman came
And laid a rose upon my breast, and said,
“May God be merciful.” She spoke my name,
And added, “It is strange to think him dead.
“He loved me well enough, but ‘t was his way
To speak it lightly.” Then, beneath her breath:
“Besides” -I knew what further she would say,
But then a footfall broke my dream of death.
To-day the words are mine. I lay the rose
Upon her breast, and speak her name, and deem
It strange indeed that she is dead. God knows
I had more pleasure in the other dream.

by Ambrose Bierce

At The Close Of The Canvass

‘Twas a Venerable Person, whom I met one Sunday morning,
All appareled as a prophet of a melancholy sect;
And in a Jeremiad of objurgatory warning
He lifted up his jodel to the following effect:
“O ye sanguinary statesmen, intermit your verbal tussles!
O ye editors and orators, consent to hear my lay!
Rest a little while the digital and maxillary muscles
And attend to what a Venerable Person has to say.
“Cease your writing, cease your shouting, cease your wild unearthly lying;
Cease to bandy such expressions as are never, never found
In the letter of a lover; cease “exposing” and “replying”
Let there be abated fury and a decrement of sound.
“For to-morrow will be Monday and the fifth day of November-
Only day of opportunity before the final rush.
Carpe diem! go conciliate each person who’s a member
Of the other party-do so while you can without a blush.
“Lo! the time is close upon you when the madness of the season
Having howled itself to silence like a Minnesota ‘clone,
Will at last be superseded by the still, small voice of reason,
When the whelpage of your folly you would willingly disown.
“Ah, ’tis mournful to consider what remorses will be thronging,
With a consciousness of having been so ghastly indiscreet,
When by accident untoward two ex-gentlemen belonging
To the opposite political denominations meet!
“Yes, ’tis melancholy, truly, to forecast the fierce, unruly
Supersurging of their blushes, like the flushes upon high
When Aurora Borealis lights her circumpolar palace
And in customary manner sets her banner in the sky.
“Each will think: ‘This falsifier knows that I too am a liar.
Curse him for a son of Satan, all unholily compound!
Curse my leader for another! Curse that pelican, my mother!
Would to God that I when little in my victual had been drowned!'”
Then that venerable warner disappeared around a corner,
And the season of unreason having also taken flight,
All the cheeks of men were burning like the skies to crimson turning
When Aurora Borealis fires her premises by night.

by Ambrose Bierce