Up in Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told in Verse. Holman Day
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.
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