Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Cornhuskers. 1918.
15. Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn
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The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They make a long-tailed rider
In the pocket of the first, the earliest evening star.
Three muskrats swim west on the Desplaines River.
Better the blue silence and the gray west,
The autumn mist on the river,
And not any hate and not any love,
And not anything at all of the keen and the deep:
Only the peace of a dog head on a barn floor,
And the new corn shoveled in bushels
And the pumpkins brought from the corn rows,
Umber lights of the dark,
Umber lanterns of the loam dark.
Not any hate, not any love.
Not anything but dreams.
Brother of dusk and umber.