XX. To My Grandmothers - Elisa Van Osdall Ann Lovejoy Churchill
I note your shawl, bonnet and sturdy shoe
Your dress, your swinging step, your out-stretched hand,
Your forward searching eye across the land.
I trace my own ancestry back through you!
No longer is your figure strange and new
But animated with the forms that stand
Enshrined in memory,--the Mother band
That followed to the west, so fine, so true!
That soul that spurned the Allegheny range!
That one adventuring far, far, beyond
The Vermont hills and destined to meet its own
Again and yet again to pass. So strange
The emerging! A child and Mother fond
Still following the lure of fire and home.