menu_book Chapter 14

from Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1914 by William Stanley Braithwaite — automated transcript, may contain recognition errors.

To a Photographer By Burton Braley Read for LibriVox.org by Bruce Kachok I have known joy and woe and toil and fight I have lived largely

I have dreamed and planned and time the sculptor With a master hand upon my face has wrought for all men sight The lines and seams of life Of growth and blight Of struggle and of service and command

And now you show me this This wax and bland and placid face Unlined, untroubled, white This is not I This fatuous face you show retouched and prettified

And smoothed to please Put back the wrinkles and the lines I know I have spent blood and brain achieving these Out of the pain, the sorrow and the wreck They are my scars of battle

Put them back Harper's Weekly Burton Braley End of poem This recording is in the public domain