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Shirt

by Carl Sandburg, 1916

I remember once I ran after you and tagged the fluttering shirt of you in the wind.
 Once many days ago I drank a glassful of something and the picture of you shivered and slid on top of the stuff.
 And again it was nobody else but you I heard in the singing voice of a careless humming woman.
 One night when I sat with chums telling stories at a bonfire flickering red embers, in a language its own talking to a spread of white stars:
               It was you that slunk laughing
               in the clumsy staggering shadows.
 Broken answers of remembrance let me know you are alive with a peering phantom face behind a doorway somewhere in the city’s push and fury
 Or under a pack of moss and leaves waiting in silence under a twist of oaken arms ready as ever to run away again when I tag the fluttering shirt of you.

Published in Chicago Poems
Published in Smoke and Steel
Tags: beauty, beginning, love

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