Читать книгу The Emek - Jessie Sampter - Страница 5
ОглавлениеTHE VILLAGE PLAN
Nahalal is a round village built on a round hill top.
Nahalal is a thought, an idea sketched in unpainted planks.
In the gray wooden shack where the town committee meets
Hangs on the wall a plan of Nahalal
Drawn by a German architect. It’s a highbrow
Up-to-date city plan, a wheel like Washington, D. C.
The hub for public buildings, with white houses around it
For less than a hundred families, and their farms outside—
An elegant plan in brown and white.
Then you step out where the village thresher stands,
Covered with clean sacks, and you see the water tower,
And the kindergarten, one shack, and the school another,
Wide fields and a cow and two horses browsing on the road.
This is the hub; but Nahalal is a wheel
On the wide mountain top, a ring of houses,
Gray boards with the wind between them, and then farms.
Around it blows the green sweep of the valley
Mountain-bounded, Samaria, Galilee,
In spring. A dream. And a hundred families.
Once Washington, D. C., was a plan on paper.
When Indians camped in the woods.
REGENERATION
I slept in the house of Regeneration
On a black horse-hair sofa. Regeneration
Everyone calls her, in Hebrew, without her surname.
Regeneration is the lone woman farmer of Nahalal,
Working her earth alone, tending her cows and poultry,
Keeping her three room cottage in emphatic comfort
Though she only sleeps there, being all day in the wind.
Arabic hangings on the rough board walls and tables,
Among the pictures, conspicuous, three photographs of a dead comrade,
Shot through the heart defending an outpost against Bedouins,
A young man, in her youth, a fellow worker.
Was he her lover? She has been more than twenty
Years working in Palestine, roughing and tramping it,
Fearless yet careful; she was a girl of alabaster,
White-handed and thin, when defiantly she came.
Now she is broadened and coarsened, the color of earth.
Regeneration is homely—one crooked eye, two teeth missing—
But she dresses with care, she wears a hat on the Sabbath.
On the Sabbath, at breakfast, she had brought in flowers from her garden,
She offered me bread of her wheat, her eggs, her butter, her cheese,
And only the salt and coffee were foreign. She eats the work of her hands.
I said: “Are you not lonely, Regeneration? Would you not live in a group?”
She said: “I have lived in groups and lost my self-feeling.
I want to create, to make a house, to see the fruit of my work.”
She works from four in the morning until ten at night
Just to feed herself, to make her bread and her milk
And earn enough to pay her taxes and buy a hat.
But she is not a lone woman spending her life just to keep alive;
She is creating, she is bringing forth,
Hers the regeneration of the sacred earth.
BEN BRAK
They call him Ben Brak, Son of the Lightning.
He is shaggy and tall as a pirate,
With black hair and whiskers to match;
And his skin is the color of copper,
But his eyes are the eyes of a poet
And his speech is the speech of a scholar
And his clothes are the clothes of a farmer.
He has been many years pioneering in Palestine,
Working hard, thinking hard, hardened to want and to danger,
Old in youth, then young, like the phoenix out of the fire.
He has come to build Nahalal and his own house in Nahalal
A young girl on the porch tossed a peach-blossom baby.
The girl was his wife, a child, and the baby his son.
Date-brown were her braids; the blue her eyes in her thin face
Morning-glories of happiness; yet she looked tired and tense
Like a flower on a dry vine. Bare were her arms and legs.
Their living room was white as the Sabbath cloth on the table.
He showed off his son and told me statistics,
He is statistician of Nahalal:
He knows how many days since it was founded,
How many trees are planted, how many babies are born.
And when he does not dig, he writes articles for newspapers.
Next evening I met him again, on the road by moonlight,
Carrying a hoe. He stopped to tell me statistics;
But soon he said: “Shalom! I must go.
I am on my way to fetch seeds for tomorrow’s planting.”
And a neighbor remarked to me: “You should have seen his wife last year;
She was young and beautiful. Now she has aged
From overwork.” And I wondered when she was born.
THE CHILDREN
In New York and Berlin and London
Psychologists are breaking their heads
To invent a school that shall educate character, will and mind
And not merely pour words into molds of knowledge.
In Nahalal, in a four room wooden barrack,
With three teachers and almost no books,
With a few paints and pencils and paper and rough tables and chairs,
They have made a school
That I should invite the psychologists
From New York and Berlin and London
To come to worship.
Why, in Nahalal, can children call their teachers by their first names
And talk to them comradely, and also to one another comradely,
In lesson time, the teacher busy with a book
And the children with other books,
All studying, each sitting where he pleases?
Why are the children so wise in Nahalal
To know it is sweet to create with pencil or clay
When the teacher does not tell them?
Why do they teach one another? Where did they learn?
Why do they paint so freely, not afraid to dab colors
As the sky and the grass and the cows dab them on the air?
Why do they work so gladly, making chairs, growing vegetables,
Feeding chickens in the dirt of the school yard?
And why are these things so easy in Nahalal
And so difficult and yet so much talked about
In New York and Berlin and London?
I met the older children
In their museum and library
Cleaning the instruments of their orchestra,
Sorting books and arranging specimens;
And they showed me a chart they had made of the rainfall,
And the skin of a rare lizard.
They are hungry for books, they have read all the books,
They are keen for discoveries.
In New York and Berlin and London
You are longing
For truth and fellowship and work and freedom,
And you would teach your children
What you do not know yourselves.
In Nahalal
White butterflies and brown
Are glimmering up the meadow,
The children running with their teacher
For a game of ball before sunset.
Bare-headed and bare-footed
Runs the baby Messiah.
THE COVENANT
Six commandments have the men of Nahalal:
1. Thou shalt not own the land,
But the Jewish National Fund shall buy and own the land.
2. Thou shalt not employ thy fellow as laborer,
But thou thyself shalt work thine own portion.
3. Thou shalt help thy fellow in his work
In his time of sickness or of trouble.
4. Thou shalt plow or reap, thou shalt plan thy sowing,
Thou shalt buy or sell not alone
But only in cooperation with thy fellows.
5. Thou shalt pay thy taxes and thy tithes
According to thy fortune and thy gain,
That all may be equal in bread.
6. Thou shalt pay thy part
For the schooling of the village children
Who are the hope, the vision and the dream.
This is the covenant of Nahalal,
Its men, its women and its earth.
From the deep spring coiled a dragon
Round the hill of Nahalal,
Poisoned swamps that with green fevers
Sucked the lives of valiant men.
Came the army of the nation,
Youths and maidens shovel-armed,
Beat the dragon, bound the dragon,
Eating fevers while they fought.
Now the fields are green with wheat,
The village fringed with willowy groves;
And the dragon is their guardian.
Bound in pipes, he tinkles jingling
While he runs about the gardens—
Friend of man, pure water.
Work from dawn till starlight,
Work in field and barn and cottage,
Work at planting fruit trees, vineyards
That will bear in time’s long ripening;
Work at building, work at breeding,
Dirty work in mud and sweat,
Grinding work with broom and kettle,
Husky work with hoe and horse.
This is the covenant of Nahalal,
Its men, its women and its land.
In the blind green country-side
Ringletted with many blossoms
Many-colored and unseen,
Near the sleeping mountains
Bosomed round the valley,
Shines the eye of Nahalal
Lashed with fringe of trees,
Open, round and seeing.
The Sleeping Beauty has opened an eye—
Nahalal—four years ago.
Languidly the mountains stretch,
The sleeping vale arouses.
Once many cities glimmered in this plain,
Camels and mules and riders threaded them,
Beads in the shining life of Israel’s sons.
Orchards and vineyards, farms and forest land,
Made a green garden of this wild-flower field.
Where now a lonely Arab horseman rides,
Young people singing passed from town to town.
Armies of many nations mingled here
With whoop of leader, roar of rythmic feet.
Blood with the rivers ran,
Flesh fertilized these fields.
“The stars in their courses fought against Sisera,
The brook Kishon swept them away,
That ancient brook, the Brook Kishon.”
A hundred times here struggling Israel fell,
Here Israel struck and conquered. Philistine
And Syrian and Assyrian, Greek and Roman
Clenched with fanatics, lovers of this earth.
Thousands of years ago for this we fought.
We bled, we died.—And other armies crossed,
Crunching their boots among the flowers—
Arab, Crusader, Turk, Napoleon,
Allenby and the British Tommy, all
Crossing the fields that slept above our graves.
Now Nahalal. Silence and a hundred families.
Beauty asleep with creeping streams of fever,
Hill beyond hill and meadow beyond meadow.
We come! The army comes, armed with our hands,
Provisioned with hunger, hungry for this earth,
We come, fanatics, zealots, loving one another,
Flesh of that ancient flesh, blood of the blood
That blossoms many-colored on these fields.
We come laden with dreams, heavy with memories.
We set them down and bare our arms for work.
This is the covenant of Nahalal,
Its men, its women and its God.
