Indiana

Indiana

God crowned her hills with beauty,

Gave her lakes and winding streams,

Then He edged them all with woodland

As the settings for our dreams,

Lovely are her moonlit rivers,

Shadowed by the sycamores

Where the fragrant winds of summer

Play along the willowed shores.

I must roam those wooded hillsides

I must heed the native call,

For a Pagan voice within me

Seems to answer to it all.

I must walk where squirrels scamper

Down a rustic old rail fence,

Where a choir of birds is singing

In the woodland green and dense.

I must learn more of my homeland

For it’s paradise to me,

There’s no haven quite as peaceful,

There’s no place I’d rather be.

Indiana is a garden

Where the seeds of peace have grown,

Where each tree, and vine, and flower

Has a beauty all its own.

Lovely are the fields and meadows

That reach out to hills that rise

Where the dreamy Wabash River

Wanders on through paradise.

The poem “Indiana” by Arthur Franklin Mapes of Kendallville was adopted as the state poem in 1963.