Listen my children

Two hundred thirty-three years ago tonight, Paul Revere, Samuel Prescott, William Dawes, and the nameless but patriotic other riders made a choice. They improvised, adapted, and overcame the British who wanted to seize the powder in Lexington and Concord. That powder would propel the shot heard 'round the world.

The patriots, true patriots, not blowhard posers wearing flag pins on their well-tailored lapels, were fighting the most powerful nation in the world, the nation they identified with, the nation whose blood ran in their veins. They had not yet pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. But they would. They were ready to govern themselves, to throw off the bogus pomp of monarchy.

They were willing to risk their own disgrace and death and bills of attainder for their families to achieve what we now have - and fritter away: liberty and self-government.

These words washed over me in childhood, became part of who I am today, and still bring loving tears to my eyes:

Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.

Those who think in this sophisticated time that Longfellow's poem is bad or overwrought, that his opening stanza is a limerick because of its rhyme scheme, should read it again. It remains a great, mythic poem, filled with brilliance and passion, despite its accessibility to a child such as I was when I begged my mother to read it to me again.

The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison-bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

...

The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.

...

And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadows brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket-ball.

...

For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beat of that steed,
And the midnight-message of Paul Revere.

And, today, I found myself bittersweet in Concord here in Massachusetts, the cradle of American liberty, crossing ground that the founders themselves crossed in a much wilder time. Our forebears accomplished so much in creating liberal democracy out of nothing but words and yearning, and we have let it slip through our fingers like the short-lived blooms of a crocus.

Who today would take the chance that they took to breathe life into a new world?