Classic Poem

No Roebling reared that primal way
With web of steel and splendid line;
Its piers were rubble, crude and gray,
Its beams were hewn of forest pine.

Across the kill that eastward flowed
It led, unjarred by rumbling tram,
Where grasses waved and lilies glowed;
New York was then Nieuw Amsterdam.

With rake and scythe at droop of day,
With lilt and carol full and free,
The maids and younkers hold their way
Along the shadowed Bouwerie.

A playful whisper stirs the trees,
A laughing ripple rills the shoal,
For here, as village law decrees,
The sweetest lips must pay the toll.

Good Saint that loved our isle, restore
That hallowed bridge, to span a tide
With blowing fields on either shore;
Let me be there with one beside!

Dispel this cloud of stone and steel,
These clogging mists of tawdry sham!
Let lips be frank and hearts be leal
As then in old Nieuw Amsterdam!