'MIGHT HAVE BEEN''Yes, it's pretty hard,' the optimistic old woman admitted. 'I have to get along with only two teeth, one in the upper jaw and one in the lower--but thank God, they meet.'
Here's to 'The days that might have been';
Here's to 'The life I might have led';
The fame I might have gathered in--
The glory ways I might have sped.
Great 'Might Have Been,' I drink to you
Upon a throne where thousands hail--
And then--there looms another view--
I also 'might have been' in jail.
O 'Land of Might Have Been,' we turn
With aching hearts to where you wait;
Where crimson fires of glory burn,
And laurel crowns the guarding gate;
We may not see across your fields
The sightless skulls that knew their woe--
The broken spears--the shattered shields--
That 'might have been' as truly so.
'Of all sad words of tongue or pen'--
So wails the poet in his pain--
The saddest are, 'It might have been,'
And world-wide runs the dull refrain.
The saddest? Yes--but in the jar
This thought brings to me with its curse,
I sometimes think the gladdest are
'It might have been a blamed sight worse.'
Grantland Rice.
From 'The Sportlight.'
