The second son
Of Kennedy
Was born in Boston, Mass.
And blessed he was,
A treasured lad,
With Irish captain class.

In youth
He played on Plymouth Rock
With older brother
Joe.
In school
He read of charging knights
In books like Ivanhoe.

He gravely tripped in Hitler's land
When he was twenty-three.
So when the cruelest noble war began,
He linked the fleet
To keep our country free.

Assigned to P.T.
109,
his crew was told to press
The ships that cruised
In Blackett Strait
And sink
The Tokyo Express.

While
On patrol one
Night
To cease supplies from sneaking through,
A Japanese
Destroyer planed his plywood boat
In two.

Because
He saved his men
And kept them from the enemy,
He won the Navy and Marine
Award
For gallantry.

He
Looked around our
Marvelous mark
And saw that it
Was
Birches bent
And dreamed
Of all that he could do
If only he were president.

A Catholic!
A Catholic never had an orphans chance
So went the scholar's myth.
But
After all the votes were in,
He was our thirty-fifth.

His New Frontiers
Were armed to fight
The enemies of man.
He wanted to evaporate
The hunger in our land.

He
Offered to our
Hemisphere
The army of our wealth
And seeded plains with corps of peace
To sugar high its health.

He made the Russian fleet retreat
Their Cuban missile sites
And guaranteed that humankind
Would have
Its civil rights.

He lamped the world
And introduced his Anti-Testing Plan,
And ninety leaders
Crossed
The first atomic ban.

The moon, the moon, the moon,
He torched the lunar race
And watered well the will
That seeded minds in space.

To walk
Or run a Kennedy mile
Became
The step of every age,
And artists
By the hundreds sketched
The presidential stage.

He served a thousand days
And sailored in Dallas
With his wife.
Before he reached his
Camelot,
A mindless, mealy
Marxman
Took his life.

A nation's love
Is not a vest against
The shells of hate.
Because he left
A brilliant green,
He heartbroke every state.

A monument of tears
Were shed
The day he waked an angel's way.
All U.S.A. loved J.F.K.
And he the U.S.A.

He
Made ancient spirits rise,
So surfaced once again
Our Father's thoughts of peace
On earth
Good will towards men.

Because he ached a fairer state
With unsurpassable times,
Eternal is his name.
Because he flashed a whiter light,
Eternal is his flame.
Becuase he gave is life,
Eternal is his flame.
Copyright © 1990 by The C Lyon