Of Earthworms, Kings and due appreciation

There is a relationship between those who do the work and those who get the credit. Mostly it is an inverse relationship. That’s how power – of men, of ‘history’ etc. work.

More broadly, we focus on gaudy and big stuff, and are contemptuous/dismissive of the day-in, day-out, because they remind us of our fragility, of all the “services” on which our sense of agency is shakily based.

Where does this come from? Two poems, and in the process a remembrance of some book about World War 2 and Malta – and a crucial oil tanker limping its way to the island having been torpedoed, and those who did the work not getting the medals, but those “above” getting them instead. Can’t remember more than that.

The poems, in full below are by Harry Martinson and Bert Brecht

The Earthworm

Who really respects the earthworm,
the farmworker far under the grass in the soil.
He keeps the earth always changing.
He works entirely full of soil,
speechless with soil, and blind.

He is the underneath farmer, the underground one,
where the fields are getting on their harvest clothes.
Who really respects him,
this deep and calm earth-worker,
this deathless, gray, tiny farmer in the planet’s soil.

Questions From a Worker Who Reads (1935)

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ? 
In the books you will read the names of kings. 
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ? 

And Babylon, many times demolished, 
Who raised it up so many times ? 

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ? 
Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. 
Who erected them ? 

Over whom did the Caesars triumph ? 
Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ? 

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, 
The drowning still cried out for their slaves. 

The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone ? 

Caesar defeated the Gauls. 
Did he not even have a cook with him ? 

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. 
Was he the only one to weep ?  

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War. 
Who else won it ? 

Every page a victory. 
Who cooked the feast for the victors ? 

Every 10 years a great man. 
Who paid the bill ? 

So many reports.  

So many questions.