A Mississippi Sonnet

That is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

Floods alongside the Mississippi deliver out the perfect in individuals who reside alongside the river. Small variations are forgotten because the waters rise. Neighbors open houses and hearts to neighbors. Strangers seem and provide help. The extra hopeless the state of affairs, the extra heroic the efforts.

For many flood fighters, the sandbag is the weapon of selection, however not all the time. In the course of the nice flood of 1888, when Illinois’ first capitol, Kaskaskia, disappeared beneath the waves, Louis William Rodenberg fought again with a sonnet fairly than a sandbag.

You possibly can learn his poem as we speak, engraved on a bronze pill on a bluff overlooking the previous website of Kaskaskia, nonetheless defying the river. Right here it’s.

O Mississippi, monarch of the plain,

Despoiler outdated! we mourn your sufferer low.

Now keep the mighty minions of your practice

That this poor vale could no extra havoc know:

Bid not far mountains burst torrential spleen

Nor tempests wreak their lightning souls in woe.

For right here, beneath your flood’s dissembling sheen

A metropolis lies, her partitions and spires down-hurled;

No stone is left whereon some chisel eager

Might inform her ravished fame unto the world.

And although your ruthless fury her defiled,

Now o’er her miry tomb your waves are pearled

With sunbeams, all too honest to be reviled

In dance ironic o’er her ruins piled.

By Louis William Rodenberg of Kaskaskia.

Take that, you nasty river!

Rock Island Traces with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana Faculty, Rock Island, Illinois.