Hello! I am researching African American cemeteries in the Cincinnati area. (I am also working on my own family names, especially Hanlin, Thompson, Garton, and Deal.) I love hearing from other Find-a-Gravers! I'm generally happy to make transfers. Regarding the gravestone photos I have taken: I am happy for anyone to use those photos, provided proper credit is given to me as the photographer.

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from Brother to Dragons

by Robert Penn Warren (1953)

...

But a river will do, when you are twelve. My own 

Hometown, it didn't have that much, and wasn't, 

God knows, a beauty spot, but there's no town

Without some country, and a ruined mill

And millpond, wood lot, and a fox's den

Can serve – or one wild goose that came one fall,

Lost from its own that like a constellation

Star-triumphing and steady thus bestrode

The imperial cold altitude, and the hoots died south.

Lost, sick, or old, it settled on a stock-pond,

And heard the arrogant clamor darkling fade,

And slept.

Kent shot it just at dawn, threw down his gun,

Crashed the skim-ice, and seized it, hugged it, ran

Three miles to town and yelled for joy and every

Step cried like a baby and did not know why.

Then at the barbershop the hangers-on

Admired the trophy, silent till one said,

"From Canady, come all that way, well I be durn."

Even without the goose you might have found

The images you'll need when you reach forty

And have to lean the single lesson left 

To learn worth learning, and that lesson is

That the only thing worth learning you had learned 

Long back before you laid the BB. down

For the .12-gauge. And that lesson is that the only

Thing in life is glory. That's a hard 

Thing to learn, and a hard fact to face,

For it knocks society's values to a coked hat,

Or seems to, for the one thing that man fears

Is the terror of salvation and the face

Of glory. But that face is all. Therefore,

Remember now your seeding and the world's magnificence,

To which the heart would answer if it could,

And sometimes can, and if it can't you'd better

Set your affairs in order and sit down

To the careful cultivation of cirrhosis,

For drink's a kind of glory, too, and man

Can't live without some glory after all,

Even a poor kind. 

From The Golden Journey To Samarkand

by James Elroy Flecker (1913)

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage 

And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, 

We Poets of the proud old lineage 

Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why, –

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales 

Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest, 

Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales, 

And winds and shadows fall towards the West: 

And there the world's first huge white-bearded kings 

In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep, 

And closer round their breasts the ivy clings, 

Cutting its pathway slow and red and deep.