Poems (Kennedy)/The Country Road
THE COUNTRY ROAD
WHITE in the sunshine, gray in the shade, Like an out-spun thread of fate,It cleaves the meadows and slips away Where the hills in ambush wait,Mounting the slopes with a sure up-lift, Dipping to valleys below,And where it begins and where is the end There's never an eye may know.
Beside it straggles an age-gray fence With gaps for the cows to pass,At the powdered hem wild violets bind The dust to the emerald grass.Above, like weaving shuttles a-wing The wrens and the blue-birds fly,And higher still the vultures sail, Black specks in the azure sky.
Here the bare-foot boys go racing past, The dust flung back like foamThere the slow-hoofed oxen, heads a-swing, Draw the hay-sweet wagons home. Where halts the trail at the clear, brown brook A way-farer stops to rest,While high on the hills, free-reined and fleet, A horseman rides on his quest.
Ah, hither and thither the travelers go, Together or else alone,Drifting away to haunts unseen Like leaves in a tempest blown—Meeting and passing as shadows cross Or clouds a-sail in the sun,Some with the tryst of life far spent, Some with it just begun.
A truant wind, like a troubadour, Sings an untranslated songAs it follows the unforgotten track The night and the whole day long.Or does it echo, that wordless sigh, The mingled laughter and tearsOf the countless hosts who have trod that way Through the dusk of the yester-years?
For the long, lone road that stretches away— A backward and onward line—Must end somewhere out under the stars In a hut or a gilded shrine;But whither it leads in its ceaseless flow The pilgrims only may see—Or to the woe of the great, sad world, Or straight into Arcady!