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  • Casting and Gathering: Toome Road

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    Muhammad Sajjad
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    daaad

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    casting and gathring

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    daaad

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    335 views2 pages

    Casting and Gathering: Toome Road

    Uploaded by

    Muhammad Sajjad
    daaad

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Flag for inappropriate content
    of 2

    Casting and Gathering

    Seamus Heaney
    for Ted Hughes
    Years and years ago, these sounds took sides:

    On the left bank a green silk tapered cast


    Went whispering through the air, saying hush
    And lush, entirely free, no matter whether
    It swished above the hayfield or the river.
    On the right bank, like a speeded-up corncrake,
    A sharp ratcheting kept on and on
    Cutting across the stillness as another
    Fisherman gathered line-lengths off his reel.

    I am still standing there, awake and dreamy.


    I have grown older and can see them both
    Moving their arms and rods, working away,
    Each one absorbed, proofed by the sounds he’s making.

    One sound is saying, ‘You aren’t worth tuppence,


    But neither is anybody. So watch Number One!’
    The other says, ‘Go with it! Give and swerve.
    You are everything you feel beside the river.’

    I love hushed air. I trust contrariness.


    Years and years go past and I cannot move
    For I see that when one man casts, the other gathers
    And then vice versa, without changing sides.

    Toome Road

    One morning early I met armoured cars


    In convoy, warbling along on powerful tyres,
    All camouflaged with broken alder branches,
    And headphoned soldiers standing up in turrets.
    How long were they approaching down my roads
    As if they owned them? The whole country was sleeping.
    I had rights-of-way, fields, cattle in my keeping,
    Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,
    Siloes, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds
    Of outhouse roofs. Whom should I run to tell
    Among all of those with their backdoors on the latch
    For the bringer of bad news, that small-hours visitant
    Who, by being expected, might be kept distant?
    Sowers of seed, erectors of headstones…
    O charioteers, above your dormant guns,
    It stands here still, stands vibrant as you pass,
    The invisible, untoppled omphalos.

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