| |
| 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. | 5 |
| Under the ribs where pulses thud | |
| And flitting between bones of skull | |
| Is the push, the endless mysterious command, | |
| Saying: | |
| “I leave you behind— | 10 |
| 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, | 15 |
| 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; | 20 |
| 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 | 25 |
| 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. | 30 |
| After all it is only this: | |
| You for the little hills and I go away. | |
| |
