Turn O Libertad, for the war is over,
From it and all henceforth expanding, doubting no more, resolute,
sweeping the world,
Turn from lands retrospective recording proofs of the past,
From the singers that sing the trailing glories of the past,
From the chants of the feudal world, the triumphs of kings, slavery,
caste,
Turn to the world, the triumphs reserv'd and to come--give up that
backward world,
Leave to the singers of hitherto, give them the trailing past,
But what remains remains for singers for you--wars to come are for
you,
(Lo, how the wars of the past have duly inured to you, and the wars
of the present also inure;)
Then turn, and be not alarm'd O Libertad--turn your undying face,
To where the future, greater than all the past,
Is swiftly, surely preparing for you.
TO THE LEAVEN'D SOIL THEY TROD.
To the leaven'd soil they trod calling I sing for the last,
(Forth from my tent emerging for good, loosing, untying the
tent-ropes,)
In the freshness the forenoon air, in the far-stretching circuits and
vistas again to peace restored,
To the fiery fields emanative and the endless vistas beyond, to the
South and the North,
To the leaven'd soil of the general Western world to attest my songs,
To the Alleghanian hills and the tireless Mississippi,
To the rocks I calling sing, and all the trees in the woods,
To the plains of the poems of heroes, to the prairies spreading wide,
To the far-off sea and the unseen winds, and the sane impalpable air;
And responding they answer all, (but not in words,)
The average earth, the witness of war and peace, acknowledges mutely,
The prairie draws me close, as the father to bosom broad the son,
The Northern ice and rain that began me nourish me to the end,
But the hot sun of the South is to fully ripen my songs.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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