Poems (Kennedy)/The Country Road

by Sara Beaumont Kennedy

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 foam
There 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 song
As 1t follows the unforgotten track
  The night and the whole day long.
Or does it echo, that wordless sigh,
  The mingled laughter and tears
Of 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!