Grant: General And President I Poem by Robert Founder

Grant was the fulfillment of all the hopes we had.
He was a Lincoln kind of man of defeats,
But knowing defeats he could learn to compete
Being merely an ordinary man and lad.

Yet there was a certain something in him
Perhaps it was his great mistakes
He failed greatly, but always played for higher stakes
That won laurels no defeat could dim.

Great men fail greatly, is a common theme
And so their rise is oft misunderstood.
No one’s prepared to have a drunk be good
We easy find the mote, but not the beam.

Grant, its true, drank and smoked a lot.
He tended to extreme in lots of things.
The very kind of man that from the prairies spring
To cauterize the Eastern rot.

Look at his opponents all his life
Mediocrity, and Minuets,
Massas, Medias and Martinets
A peaceful man forced to a life of drums and fifes.

He came from out the prairie fastness
Where from came Lincoln; Ronald Reagan too
Only a son of the prairie sod would do
To bust the old regime’s smugness.