Josiah Tompkins by Edgar Lee Masters — Read

I was well known and much beloved / And rich, as fortunes are reckoned / In Spoon River, where I had lived and worked.

That was the home for me, / Though all my children had flown afar --

Which is the way of Nature -- all but one.

The boy, who was the baby, stayed at home, / To be my help in my failing years / And the solace of his mother.

But I grew weaker, as he grew stronger, / And he quarreled with me about the business, / And his wife said I was a hindrance to it;

And he won his mother to see as he did, / Till they tore me up to be transplanted / With them to her girlhood home in Missouri.

And so much of my fortune was gone at last, / Though I made the will just as he drew it, / He profited little by it.