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Wind Song

by Carl Sandburg, 1920

Long ago I learned how to sleep,
 In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,
 In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,
 In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, “Who, who are you?”
 I slept with my head in an elbow on a summer afternoon and there I took a sleep lesson.
 There I went away saying: I know why they sleep, I know how they trap the tricky winds.
 Long ago I learned how to listen to the singing wind and how to forget and how to hear the deep whine,
 Slapping and lapsing under the day blue and the night stars:
   Who, who are you?

 Who can ever forget
 listening to the wind go by
 counting its money
 and throwing it away?

Published in Smoke and Steel
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