Newspaper History presents media sourced from a United States newspaper dating back 108 years.

  • To a Photographer

    From The Birmingham Age Herald, January 5, 1915. By Berton Braley.

    I have known joy and woe and toil and fight;
        I have lived largely, I have dreamed and planned,
        And Time, the Sculptor, with a master hand
    Upon my face has wrought for all men’s sight
    The lines and seams of Life, of growth and blight,
        Of struggle and of service and command;
        And now you show me This—this waxen, bland
    And placid—unlined, untroubled, white!
    This is not I—this fatuous face you show
        Retouched and prettified and smoothed to please.
    Put back the wrinkles and the lines I know,
        I have spent blood and brain achieving these;
    Out of the pain, the sorrow and the wrack,
    They are my scars of battle—Put Them Back!