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The coat without a seam, and other poems cover

The coat without a seam, and other poems

Chapter 26: THE CREED OF AN AMERICAN
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About This Book

This collection of lyric and narrative poems moves between wartime urgency and reflective peace, offering sonnets, elegies, and short lyrics that interrogate sacrifice, patriotism, and the yearning for reconciliation. Voices range from public banners and martial images to intimate meditations on grief, domestic memory, and nature. Frequent religious and moral imagery frames contemplations of duty, loss, and the possibility of a unified humanity. Formal variety includes sonnet sequences and freer lyrics, often balancing didactic rhetoric with tender observation to consider how communities and individuals reckon with conflict, remembrance, and the promise of healing.

THE CREED OF AN AMERICAN

In God our Father, and in all men’s Sonship;
In Brother-love and breaking down of barriers;
In Law that is the just will of the People
Shaped, and still shaping, to the People’s need;
In equal Freedom and in equal Service,
Duties and Rights: in all these I believe.
In these great States bound in a greater Union,
Many in One, the framework of the Fathers,
Nobly devised, a forecast of the future
When all the Nations gather in God’s fold;
The great Experiment, the high Adventure,
The captain Hope: in all this I believe.
In this bright Flag of Liberty and Union:
Its red, the symbol of the blood of brothers
That flows through men of every race and nation;
Its white, the symbol of the peace between them
That shall be when God’s Will has wrought as leaven;
Its stars, the symbol of many Powers that move
Clustering together without clash or conflict,
In the deep blue of the vast, tender sky
That is the all-enfolding mantle of God—
With my whole soul in all these I believe.
That I in peace must show my true allegiance
To this bright Flag, this constellated Union,
By square-done work and clean unselfish living;
That I in war must show my true allegiance—
While war shall linger in this world to threaten
Such Sanctities as these—even by my dying:
In all this I believe. Amen. Amen.