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.
