Читать книгу Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse - Holman Day - Страница 13

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From the acres of Aroostook, broad and mellow

in the sun,

Down to rocky York, the chorus of the farmers

has begun.

They are riding in Aroostook on a patent sulky

plow,

—They are riding, taking comfort, for they’ve

learned the secret how.

They are planting their potatoes with a whirring

new machine,

—Driver sits beneath an awning; slickest thing

you’ve ever seen.

There is not a rock to vex ’em in the acres

spreading wide,

So they sit upon a cushion, cock their legs, and

smoke and ride.

Gee and Bright go lurching onward in the

furrow’s mellow steam;

Over there, with clank of whiffle, tugs a sturdy

Morgan team.

And the man who rides the planter or who plods

the broken earth

Joins and swells the mighty chorus of the

season’s budding mirth.

And they’ve pitched the tune to a jubilant

strain.

They are lilting it merrily now.

We wait for that melody up here in Maine,

—’Tis the song of the harrow and plow.

They are picking rocks in Oxford, and in Waldo

blasting ledge,

And they’re farming down in Lincoln on their

acres set on edge.

Down among the kitchen gardens of the slopes

of Cumberland

They’re sticking in the garden sass as thick as

it will stand.

And every nose is sniffing at the scent of fur-

rowed earth,

And every man is living all of life at what it’s

worth.

Though the farmer in Aroostook sails across a

velvet field,

And his mellow, crumbly acres vomit forth a

spendthrift yield,

All the rest are just as cheerful on their hillside

farms as he,

For there’s cosy wealth in gardens and a fortune

in a tree.

So they’re singing the song of the coming

of Spring,

And the song of the empty mow;

Of the quiver of birth that is stirring the earth,

—’Tis the song of the harrow and plow.