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The Red Son

by Carl Sandburg, 1916

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.

Published in Chicago Poems
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