The Family Genealogy - Poem by Donald Lines Jacobus

The Family Genealogy

Compendium of dullness, in your pages

   Name crowds on name; the humble and the great

Each in few lines receives his equal wages,

   And headstrong passions crumble to a date.

Here are the founders of a mighty nation;

   Here are the pioneers who won the soil,

As generation followed generation,

   With axe and plough and with back-breaking toil.

Here are the women of a hardy people,

   Weakness and doubt yielding to faith held fast;

The pulled-up stakes; eyes lifted to the steeple;

   Farewells to home; the new homes gained at last.

Here are the hints of buried old romances;

   The broken families, and the too young dead;

The autumn frolics and the village dances;

   Roll of recruiting drums, the soldier's tread.

And here are darker things, now long forgotten;

   The unwed mothers; the deserted wives;

Misdeeds of rogues far better unbegotten;

   Heartbreak and self-destruction; ruined lives.

All this and far, far more is in these pages

   If we might clothe with flesh the lifeless names,

Parade the knaves, the saints, the fools, the sages,

   And resurrect their obloquies and fames.

Their names, their dates, are entered in a column,

   The unjust here embalmed beside the just;

And in the pages of this dusty volume

   A second time they moulder into dust.

Donald Lines Jacobus