Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Chicago Poems. 1916.

142. The Red Son

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.