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. | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...MAGDALEN by GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON THE GUARDIAN OF THE RED DISK (SPOKEN BY A CITIZEN OF MALTA - 1300) by EMMA LAZARUS THE BLACK MONKEY by KATHERINE MANSFIELD CHARLOTTE CORDAY (REVOLUTIONARY TRIBUNAL, JULY 17, 1793) by EDGAR LEE MASTERS |