On The Eve Of An Election

Please note:  this is not a political blog and this is not a political post.  Rather, it is a post about one's nation, and about the political class (not the people) of one's nation.  The following poem is by C. H. Sisson, an Englishman who was described, in the Telegraph's 2003 obituary, as a "doughty defender of traditional Anglicanism" who held "unfashionable high Tory views."  (As I have said before:  A man after my own heart, even though I am not an Englishman, an Anglican, or a Tory.)

               Thinking of Politics

Land of my fathers, you escape me now
And yet I will in no wise let you go:
Let none imagine that I do not know
How little sight of you the times allow.
Yet you are there, and live, no matter how
The troubles which surround you seem to grow:
The steps of ancestors are always slow,
But always there behind the current row,
And always and already on the way:
They will be heard on the appropriate day.

C. H. Sisson, What and Who (1994).

                       A future presidential candidate at the age of 42.
                            Headquarters of the Army of the Potomac.
                                   Cold Harbor, Virginia.  June, 1864.