As you plaited the harvest bow <br />You implicated the mellowed silence in you <br />In wheat that does not rust <br />But brightens as it tightens twist by twist <br />Into a knowable corona, <br />A throwaway love-knot of straw. <br /> <br />Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks <br />And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks <br />Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent <br />Until your fingers moved somnambulant: <br />I tell and finger it like braille, <br />Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable, <br /> <br />And if I spy into its golden loops <br />I see us walk between the railway slopes <br />Into an evening of long grass and midges, <br />Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges, <br />An auction notice on an outhouse wall— <br />You with a harvest bow in your lapel, <br /> <br />Me with the fishing rod, already homesick <br />For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick <br />Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes <br />Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes <br />Nothing: that original townland <br />Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand. <br /> <br />The end of art is peace <br />Could be the motto of this frail device <br />That I have pinned up on our deal dresser— <br />Like a drawn snare <br />Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn <br />Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.<br /><br />Seamus Heaney<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-harvest-bow/
