Читать книгу Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse - Holman Day - Страница 19

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If ye only knew the backaches in an old stun’

wall!

O, Lordy me,

I’m seventy-three!

—Begun amongst these boulders and I’ve lived

here through it all.

I wasn’t quite to bub’s age there, when dad

commenced to clear

The wust of ninety acres with a hoss team and

a steer.

And we’ve used the stun’s for fencin’ and we’ve

built around the lot,

O, I’ve tugged and worked there, sonny, ontil

gracious me, I’ve sot

And fairly groaned o’ evenings with the twinges

in my back;

Sakes, there warn’t no shirkin,’ them days; it

was tug and lift and sack,

For it needed lots of muscle, lots of gruntin’,

lots of sand

If a feller calculated for to clear a piece of

land.

Bub, it isn’t any wonder that our backs has got

a hump,

That our arms are stretched and awkward like

the handle on a pump,

That our palms are hard and calloused, that we

wobble in our gait

—There’s the reason right before you ’round

the medders in the State.

And I wonder sometimes, sonny, that we’ve

any backs at all

When I figer on the backaches in an

Old

Stun’

Wall.

If ye only knew the backaches in an old stun’

wall!

We read of men

Who with a pen

Have pried away the curses that have crushed

us in their fall.

I don’t begrudge them honor nor the splendor

of their name

For an av’rage Yankee farmer hasn’t any use

for fame,

But the man who lifted curses and the man

who lifted stones

Never’ll hear a mite of diff’runce in the

Heavenly Father’s tones.

For I have the humble notion, bub, that when

all kinds of men,

The chaps that pried with crowbar and the

chaps that pried with pen,

Are waitin’ to be measured for the things

they’ve done below

The angel with the girth-chain’s bound to give

us all fair show.

And the humble man who’s tussled with the

rocks of stubborn Maine

Won’t find that all his labor has been thankless

and in vain.

And while the wise and mighty get the glorious

credit due

The man who took the brunt of toil will be

remembered too.

The man who bent his aching back will earn

his crown, my child,

By the acres he made fertile and the miles of

rocks he piled.

That ain’t my whole religion, for I don’t propose

to shirk

What my duties are to Heaven—but the gospel

of hard work

Is a mighty solid bed-rock that I’ve built on

more or less;

I believe that God Almighty has it in his heart

to bless

For the good they’ve left behind them rough old

chaps with humped-up backs

Who have gone ahead and smoothed things with

the crowbar and the axe.

For if all our hairs are numbered and He notes

the sparrow’s fall

He understands the backaches in an

Old

Stun’

Wall.