"At a Window" by Carl Sandburg

"The Starry Night" Vincent Van Gogh 1889

Give me hunger,

O you gods that sit and give

The world its orders.

Give me hunger, pain and want,

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame,

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,

A voice to speak to me in the day end,

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness.

In the dusk of day-shapes

Blurring the sunset,

One little wandering, western star

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window,

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk

And wait and know the coming

Of a little love.

"Shirt" by Carl Sandburg

"Study for the Bachelor" Andrew Wyeth 1964

I remember once I ran after you and tagged the fluttering

      shirt of you in the wind.

Once many days ago I drank a glassful of something and

      the picture of you shivered and slid on top of the stuff.

And again it was nobody else but you I heard in the

      singing voice of a careless humming woman.

One night when I sat with chums telling stories at a

      bonfire flickering red embers, in a language its own

      talking to a spread of white stars:

                          It was you that slunk laughing

                          in the clumsy staggering shadows.

Broken answers of remembrance let me know you are

      alive with a peering phantom face behind a doorway

      somewhere in the city’s push and fury.

Or under a pack of moss and leaves waiting in silence

      under a twist of oaken arms ready as ever to run

      away again when I tag the fluttering shirt of you.