Elliott Hawkins by Edgar Lee Masters

I looked like Abraham Lincoln.

I was one of you, Spoon River, in all fellowship, / But standing for the rights of property and for order.

A regular church attendant, / Sometimes appearing in your town meetings to warn you / Against the evils of discontent and envy, / And to denounce those who tried to destroy the Union, / And to point to the peril of the Knights of Labor.

My success and my example are inevitable influences / In your young men and in generations to come, / In spite of attacks of newspapers like the Clarion;

A regular visitor at Springfield / When the Legislature was in session / To prevent raids upon the railroads, / And the men building up the state.

Trusted by them and by you, Spoon River, equally / In spite of the whispers that I was a lobbyist.

Moving quietly through the world, rich and courted.

Dying at last, of course, but lying here / Under a stone with an open book carved upon it / And the words "Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven."

And now, you world-savers, who reaped nothing in life / And in death have neither stones nor epitaphs, / How do you like your silence from mouths stopped / With the dust of my triumphant career?