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Sumach and Birds

by Carl Sandburg, 1920

If you never came with a pigeon rainbow purple
 Shining in the six o’clock September dusk:
 If the red sumach on the autumn roads
 Never danced on the flame of your eyelashes:
 If the red-haws never burst in a million
 Crimson fingertwists of your heartcrying:
 If all this beauty of yours never crushed me
 Then there are many flying acres of birds for me,
 Many drumming gray wings going home I shall see,
 Many crying voices riding the north wind.

Published in Smoke and Steel
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