First Fourth

Last night we watch fireworks from the most appropriate places possible, the Inner Harbor, and Ft. McHenry.  It was about a 15 minute walk from the house and that was with Alan's niece and nephew in tow. The fireworks were pretty spectacular.  Click on the photos to see the whole album in Picasa.

In case you don't know, Ft. McHenry is the home/subject of the Star Spangled Banner, which Francis Scott Key wrote as a poem while imprisoned on a British ship in the Patapsco River.  During the war of 1812 (though written in 1814) he watched as the bombs landed through the night in the Chesapeake Bay, awaking to see the flag still flying above the Fort the next morning.  What a lot of people don't know is that the poem goes on past the first stanza that we know as our national anthem.

O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming!
And the rockets's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there:
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the mornings' first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation
Then conquer we must when our cause it is just
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!