The Red Son- Carl Sandburg

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.

Sunset - Nathan B.

His eyes were lost
in the distance.
He did not see her
before him,
her form a silhouette
in the grandeur of
the flames of the setting sun.
It set the sky
on fire. It made
the oceanblack,
burning the sky down,
’til all was burnt black
in the fire of the sun.

There was light beyond her,
bursting forth
from the horizon,
powerful and pure.

His eyes fixated upon the vision,
’til she dissolved into oblivion.
Stepping through her, he
dissolved into the vision:

All became one,
a focused unit,
the illumined sky,
the black ocean,
the blazing sun,
himself,
the sun igniting the sky,
the ocean drinking in the sun,
the sky enveloping the flame,
his sight filling with vision.

In - Andrew Hudgins

When we first heard from blocks away

the fog truck’s blustery roar,

we dropped our toys, leapt from our meals,

and scrambled out the door

into an evening briefly fuzzy.

We yearned to be transformed—

translated past confining flesh

to disembodied spirit. We swarmed

in thick smoke, taking human form

before we blurred again,

turned vague and then invisible,

in temporary heaven.

Freed of bodies by the fog,

we laughed, we sang, we shouted.

We were our voices, nothing else.

Voice was all we wanted.

The white clouds tumbled down our streets

pursued by spellbound children

who chased the most distorting clouds,

ecstatic in the poison.

A Letter - Kathryn H.

Cold, I am cold, cold
straining for the sun
old, I feel old, old
tired and undone.

Talk to me of happy things:
the shift of smells that autumn brings
beaches, dunes, and whispered sands
swans and gulls and sunny lands.

Though why I ache is not quite clear
I feel much better with you near
I'm not alone when in my ear
your optimism sounds

I eagerly await the day
When all earth is in heaven's sway
and friends will never go away
and life is without bounds

But Emmy dear, it's rather clear
though nigher draws this higher day
and though I'd love to fly away
and see you where you are,

we must each take the life we make
and form it to its finest shape;
I only hope that when I wake
that love won't feel so far,
that love won't feel so far.