Carl Sandburg

Personality

Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification Bureau

YOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
    one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and
    win all the world’s honors, but when you come back
    home the print of the one thumb your mother gave
    you is the same print of thumb you had in the old
    home when your mother kissed you and said good-by.
Out of the whirling womb of time come millions of men
and their feet crowd the earth and they cut one anothers’
    throats for room to stand and among them all
    are not two thumbs alike.
Somewhere is a Great God of Thumbs who can tell the
    inside story of this.
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