Читать книгу Labor and the Angel - Duncan Campbell Scott - Страница 4

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Sun on the mountain,

Shade in the valley,

Ripple and lightness

Leaping along the world,

Sun, like a gold sword

Plucked from the scabbard,

Striking the wheat-fields,

Splendid and lusty,

Close-standing, full-headed,

Toppling with plenty;

Shade, like a buckler

Kindly and ample,

Sweeping the wheat-fields

Darkening and tossing;

There on the world-rim

Winds break and gather

Heaping the mist

For the pyre of the sunset;

And still as a shadow,

In the dim westward,

A cloud sloop of amethyst

Moored to the world

With cables of rain.

Acres of gold wheat

Stir in the sunshine,

Rounding the hill-top,

Crested with plenty,

Filling the valley,

Brimmed with abundance;

Wind in the wheat-field

Eddying and settling,

Swaying it, sweeping it,

Lifting the rich heads,

Tossing them soothingly;

Twinkle and shimmer

The lights and the shadowings,

Nimble as moonlight

Astir in the mere.

Laden with odors

Of peace and of plenty,

Soft comes the wind

From the ranks of the wheat-field,

Bearing a promise

Of harvest and sickle-time,

Opulent threshing-floors

Dusty and dim

With the whirl of the flail,

And wagons of bread,

Down-laden and lumbering

Through the gateways of cities.

When will the reapers

Strike in their sickles,

Bending and grasping,

Shearing and spreading;

When will the gleaners

Searching the stubble

Take the last wheat-heads

Home in their arms?

Ask not the question!—

Something tremendous

Moves to the answer.

Hunger and poverty

Heaped like the ocean

Welters and mutters,

Hold back the sickles!

Millions of children

Born to their terrible

Ancestral hunger,

Starved in their mothers’ womb,

Starved at the nipple, cry—

Ours is the harvest!

Millions of women

Learned in the tragical

Secrets of poverty,

Sweated and beaten, cry—

Hold back the sickles!

Millions of men

With a vestige of manhood,

Wild-eyed and gaunt-throated,

Shout with a leonine

Accent of anger,

Leave us the wheat-fields!

When will the reapers

Strike in their sickles?

Ask not the question;

Something tremendous

Moves to the answer.

Long have they sharpened

Their fiery, impetuous

Sickles of carnage,

Welded them æons

Ago in the mountains

Of suffering and anguish;

Hearts were their hammers

Blood was their fire,

Sorrow their anvil,

(Trusty the sickles

Tempered with tears;)

Time they had plenty—

Harvests and harvests

Passed them in agony,

Only a half-filled

Ear for their lot;

Man that had taken

God for a master

Made him a law,

Mocked him and cursed him,

Set up this hunger,

Called it necessity,

Put in the blameless mouth

Judas’s language:

The poor ye have with you

Alway, unending.

But up from the impotent

Anguish of children,

Up from the labor

Fruitless, unmeaning,

Of millions of mothers,

Hugely necessitous,

Grew by a just law

Stern and implacable,

Art born of poverty,

The making of sickles

Meet for the harvest.

And now to the wheat-fields

Come the weird reapers

Armed with their sickles,

Whipping them keenly

In the fresh-air fields,

Wild with the joy of them,

Finding them trusty,

Hilted with teen.

Swarming like ants,

The Idea for captain,

No banners, no bugles,

Only a terrible

Ground-bass of gathering

Tempest and fury,

Only a tossing

Of arms and of garments;

Sexless and featureless,

(Only the children

Different among them,

Crawling between their feet,

Borne on their shoulders;)

Rolling their shaggy heads

Wild with the unheard-of

Drug of the sunshine;

Tears that had eaten

The half of their eyelids

Dry on their cheeks;

Blood in their stiffened hair

Clouted and darkened;

Down in their cavern hearts

Hunger the tiger,

Leaping, exulting;

Sighs that had choked them

Burst into triumphing;

On they come, Victory!

Up to the wheat-fields,

Dreamed of in visions

Bred by the hunger,

Seen for the first time

Splendid and golden;

On they come fluctuant,

Seething and breaking,

Weltering like fire

In the pit of the earthquake,

Bursting in heaps

With the sudden intractable

Lust of the hunger:

Then when they see them—

The miles of the harvest

White in the sunshine,

Rushing and stumbling,

With the mighty and clamorous

Cry of a people

Starved from creation,

Hurl themselves onward,

Deep in the wheat-fields,

Weeping like children,

After ages and ages,

Back at the breasts

Of their mother the earth.

Night in the valley,

Gloom on the mountain,

Wind in the wheat,

Far to the southward

The flutter of lightning,

The shudder of thunder;

But high at the zenith,

A cluster of stars

Glimmers and throbs

In the grasp of the midnight,

Steady and absolute,

Ancient and sure.