Classic Poem

I've heard of a certain Mohammed who dwelt in a hut on Arabian sands
And every year of his residence felt that a duty he had on his hands
To make an excursion his Mecca to seek, a trip to the home of his race,
A sort of original Home Coming Week, now so common in every place.

He'd pack up his duffle, his tent and his shrine and would beat it back home for a spell
To see if the cocoanut harvest was fine and if all of his cousins were well.
This pilgrimage habit grew rapidly so that it now is the regular thing
And every season Mohammedans go up to Mecca its praises to sing.

I always have felt sort of kinship to those who go journey to Mecca afar,
Though I have no Koran concealed in my clothes, neither know what Mohammedans are.
But every year I am up and away to a Mecca, a shrine of my own,
That calls me as loudly and as surely as they who are called by a city of stone.

My Mecca's the woods, just the woods in the Fall, when October comes rolling around —
The camp and the river, the pine and it all, when the frost takes a-hold of the ground.
It isn't religion that gets me to go and it isn't a psalm or a prayer —
It's twenty-eight dollars, or thirty or so, they are paying for swampers up there.

It's chuck in the day and a bunk in the night and the stake when we quit in the Spring
That coaxes me northward to work and to fight — only these are the why of the thing.
The folks in the East go to Mecca to lay in a new stock of faith for the year,
But I, I go up to my Mecca for pay — when I'm busted, to get in the clear.

I guess that's the way of the East and the West, it's the way of the new and the old,
That they are content on religion to rest, while we Yankees are out for the gold.
You couldn't get Yankees to go on a hike up to any Mohammedan shrine,
But offer them thirty a month and they'll strike for the land of the hemlock and pine.

They say that we worship the dollar too much, we are crazy for riches, they say;
They say we are worse than the Scotch or the Dutch, that it's quite the American way.
If pulling the briar or pounding the plugs for a dollar a day is a crime,
What's asking three hundred for dirty old rugs that were made in your grandfather's time?

If this is a showdown of Meccas, my friends, of the Yank or Arabian kind,
We look at the matter from different ends and we each have a different mind.
The man who looked down on us both from a shelf he would say, when he saw how we did,
There's good in a man who will bury himself in the woods for the sake of his kid.

The fellow who diets on cocoanut milk and who spends all his moments in prayer
Thinks he has a soul that is finer than silk, that is ready its winglets to wear.
But what of the man in a mackinaw shirt, one who thinks of the girl that he wed,
Who's willing to swamp and to dig in the dirt that the wife and the kids may be fed?

I'm thinking my Mecca is moral as his, though it's lit by no altars ablaze;
I guess my religion is work, all it is, yet I think it deserving of praise.
Perhaps the good Lord, when before Him I go, He will hand me a crown and will say,
" This man had to make him a living below and I guess was too busy to pray. "