Sthephan G. Stephansson Poetry
THE BROTHERS' DESTINY
I
For ages the growth had been garnered.
The ground was still blowing away.
And closer and closer each farmer
Had cut down the trees and the hay.
Each tenant, in turn, that departed
Had taken his pound since he started
And timed the last take to the day.
Each son that succeeded his elders
Received a less fruitful estate.
The longer the line of the fathers
The less would the heritage rate.
The last of the lot were two brothers
To live on the desert the others
Had looted and left to its fate.
They blamed all their forebears and fathers
For faithless and shameful neglect.
On nostrums and needs they debated,
But never agreed in effect.
Yet faster than language could frame it,
They felt that they had to reclaim it,
Or flee from a region so wrecked.
One brother, less sanguine, decided
To search at the borders for gold.
He deemed that there must be some metals
In mountains so rugged and old.
At night he had noted a glimmer,
A nebulous kind of a shimmer,
From underground treasures untold.
The other one went on the warpath
To wake up the glade and the field,
To coax the young birch from the border
And better the ground and the yield,
To lure the tough ling up the highlands,
To liven the pines on the dry-lands
And sew up the sward till it healed.
They parted; for pride and ambition
So pull at the ties of the clan.
No other enticements can answer
When Honor has called to the man
Who gears not his work to his wages,
But wills the result to the ages
And plans to improve what he can.
As brothers they talked at the table
And teamed at the games of the day.
As foes on the commons they quarreled
On questions of state, as we say.
But always the better-fixed brother
Would be the same friend to the other
And share both his house and his hay.
II
In centuries progress is patterned
And proved, not in days or in years;
And visions that time found the truest
Betoken which epoch endears.
But always the people are proudest
And play up their freedoms the loudest
Whenever no, author appears.
Though both of the brothers have vanished
And buried the story now lies,
And none of the tales that are told us
The text of their lives may comprise,
The will and the work they expended
To worthwhile improvements have tended
And paths that would open the eyes.
III
In sooth there's a fable or folklore
Some few are repeating today
That deep in the past when the people
Were poorer and full of dismay,
A skeleton bleaching and broken
Had been to the finder a token
That tempting rich treasures there lay.
Who froze there in raiments so ragged
The rock-slide alone could retell.
One forearm, though brittle, still beckoned
To breaks in the side of the fell.
In frost-cracks that long had been littered
The loadstones in particles glittered
Like ghost-eyes agleam in a cell.
And much of the precious metal
The mob that came after had found;
For Toil, ever tempted by profit.
Kept tearing the wealth from the ground.
The mountains, now mined to their bases.
Were moved through the gaps in their faces
And yielded up stores that astound.
For profit the brother had blasted
The boulders with weakening hands
And torn from the treasures behind them
Their time-honored rock-woven bands.
And man set the mountains ashiver,
To make them consent to deliver
And bow to their master's commands.
And still 'mid the rocks and the ruins
Men root for the glittering dross.
They follow the rut like their rivals
And reap but the toil and the loss.
— It seems like the shade of the brother,
Still shining, reveals to another
The spectre of gold and its gloss.
IV
In Sundale's new farmsteads, so fertile,
By folks it's remembered and told
How gardens had built out their borders
While birches grew stalwart and old.
The barrens got fewer and fewer,
The fatherland better and newer
— A sight for the sons to behold!
A tree in what once was the wasteland
Keeps watch o'er the dale and the steeps,
And under its shadow in silence
'Tis said that the brother now sleeps.
A hillock near-hidden with flowers
Is his, that envisioned these bowers
And sealed up the sandpits for keeps.
And people have faith in the forest
That fondly has sheltered the one
Who fostered the trees and the flowers
And first of the tribe had begun
To bid for more dews for the dry-lands,
To drive the brave furze up the highlands
And temper both shower and sun.
The vessels our seamen are sailing
Were sawn from the timbers at home,
And proud of their part, as a symbol,
They play it wherever they roam.
From ports with the products of labor
They ply to the marts of a neighbor
Or sally afar o'er the foam.
When summer returns on its cycle
And sweeps out the cold and the snow,
It seems that the brother's own being
Still bides in the soil that we hoe,
— Like hope had been sown in the seedlands,
His soul in the beautiful treed-lands,
His mind in the grasses that grow.
V
We see in each fact, not the fable,
As feebly we search and appraise,
That law, if illucid, is stable
And leaves but one prospect to face:
To think not in hours, but in ages,
At eve not to claim all our wages,
Will bring out the best in the race.
Through sins that may seem to enfetter
The sharp will instinctively learn
To change what is best to a better
In building the future we earn —.
It isn't today, with its dancing
And dreams, but the art of advancing,
That buys what the seers can discern.
Written in 1906
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