Amanuensis Monday - Grandma Hill's Poetry, Week 34

A Lonesome Town

The town is big and lonesome

Every day is a lonesome day.

For the boys who donned the khaki

Have waved, and marched away.

There are gleams of yellow sunshine

Coming through the new leafed trees

And the butterflies have wakened

We hear the hum of the honeybees.

The sounds are as cheerful as of old

As we watch the children run and play

But the boys, just out of school,

Have waved to us and gone away.

Yes, the boys have gone and left us

have marched away, khaki clad

And the town is big and lonesome

The days are not so glad

As they used to be.

The birds Sing as gayly in the tree.

But it seems the world will never be

The same as it used to be.

‘Till we have the boys back with us,

‘Till we hear their marching feet

And see them waving again to us

Coming gaily down the street.

They are boys, who were just little bits

of fellows, only yesterday,

Full of talk about their kites and marbles

And now they’ve marched away.

Marched away, like grown men, to meet

And battle with a foreign foe.

Our hearts were sad, but proud, to have

Them wave to us, then turn and go.

We know they’ll do their duty nobly

Our brave boys in khaki brown,

But ‘till they come marching home

This will be a lonesome town.

Nancy Jane Wiley Hill (1875-1960) was always writing something.  Many of those poems are now in the possession of her granddaughter Shirley Kern.  Shirley, with the help of her sister-in-law Ruth Ormsby, transcribed these poems in 1996 for a Hill-Ormsby-Kern family reunion.  I am going to post many of these poems so that they may be enjoyed by all.

These are copyright 1996 and reprinted with permission.