Mary Gay: The Pen That Saw War

Lyrics

The year is eighteen sixty-four.
The summer air is thick and still.
Before the dust, before the war
Came riding up the grassy hill.
Just a town beside the rails.
A courthouse, a church, a quiet square.

Then on the eighteenth day of July,
A different sound. A different rhythm.
General Garrard's cavalry riding by,
Blue coats swarm, and settle with 'em.
Mary watches from her window pane,
Her little town is not her own.
The clatter of hooves in the summer rain,
A harvest of steel is being sown.

There is a hurried, frantic ballet.
A whisper in the drawing room.
Where does the family silver lay?
Buried deep to escape the doom.
Twice she moves it in the garden soil,
A small defiance in the dirt.
A life's collection, born of toil,
Beneath the roses, safe from hurt.

And the pen sees war from a second-story view,
On Old Stone Mountain Road, the ink begins to flow.
She writes what the cannonball screams as it flew,
What the women whispered, soft and low.
The window rattles, the timbers shake,
But the hand is steady for history's sake.
This is Mary Gay, making her mark.
A single candle in the coming dark.

July the twenty-second breaks.
Wheeler's charge, the rebel yell.
The very foundation of the courthouse quakes,
A town transformed into a living hell.
"The roar of artillery," she would write,
"The rattle of musketry... awful."
She feels perfectly helpless in the fading light,
As the Georgia Railroad becomes a battle call.

The years pass. The sounds are gone.
The silver is unearthed, the soldiers, dust.
Eighteen ninety-two, a different dawn.
A book is bound, fulfilling a trust.
"Life in Dixie," the pages turn.
Her story told, a lesson learned.
Though other voices fell like rain,
And soaked the soil, and felt the pain,
Her single truth is what remains.

The pen that saw the war.
The ink is dry now.
The window is quiet.
But the words are there.
The words are still there.
On Old Stone Mountain Road.