Heaven on Earth

We need not wait to go to heaven; it’s possible that heaven will come to us.

In June, 1917, a poem by an anonymous author appeared in the Hobo News of St. Louis, Missouri. Called “The Hobo’s Last Lament,” it relates the last words of one of those princes of the open road who was dying as he lay stretched out inside an empty boxcar on a railroad siding.

A fellow hobo is solemnly listening in. He hears his friend utter these words:

I’m going to a better land,
Where everything is bright,
Where beef-stews grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night;
And you do not have to work at all,
And never change your socks,
And streams of goodly whisky
Come trickling down the rocks.

The dying man has a message for his fellow wanderers. Don’t weep for him, he says. A train is coming: “A fast freight.” He intends to ride it to “a better land, where they hate the word called work”:

Hark, I hear her whistling,
I must catch her on the fly;
I would like one scoop of beer
Once more before I die.
The hobo stopped, his head fell back,