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Read more poems by Carl Sandburg: Carl Sandburg Poems at Poetry X.

I love your faces I saw the many years
I drank your milk and filled my mouth
With your home talk, slept in your house
And was one of you.
          But a fire burns in my heart.
Under the ribs where pulses thud
And flitting between bones of skull
Is the push, the endless mysterious command,
          Saying:
"I leave you behind--
You for the little hills and the years all alike,
You with your patient cows and old houses
Protected from the rain,
I am going away and I never come back to you;
Crags and high rough places call me,
Great places of death
Where men go empty handed
And pass over smiling
To the star-drift on the horizon rim.
My last whisper shall be alone, unknown;
I shall go to the city and fight against it,
And make it give me passwords
Of luck and love, women worth dying for,
And money.
          I go where you wist not of
          Nor I nor any man nor woman.
          I only know I go to storms
          Grappling against things wet and naked."
There is no pity of it and no blame.
None of us is in the wrong.
After all it is only this:
          You for the little hills and I go away.

Added: 16 Jun 2002 | Last Read: 7 Sep 2026 12:12 AM | Viewed: 3725 times

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