Plain of Menotomy 1775

It was not only at Concord Bridge,

Nor yet at Lexington Green,

That Heroes showed on that April Day,

When patriots stood between

A monarch’s greed and the freeman’s right

Devised from the sire to the son:

Menotomy, too, had part in the fray,

And grief when the day was done.

Menotomy’s plain was a field of war,

When the enemy came in retreat,

And the red-coat toll which her townsmen took

Had a place in a king’s defeat;

And the lives which her townsmen gave that day,

Were theirs to withhold or give,

They craved no praise, but to us it falls

To see that their fame shall live.

We pluck no leaf from another’s wreath,

Deduct no word from his due;

But our own are our own, and we ask that they

Shall share in the honor, too;

When the battlefields of that day are named,

Remember that there are three:

Lexington Green, and the Concord Bridge,

And the Plain of Menotomy.

                                        - JAMES G. KEENAN