Carl Sandburg

THIN sheets of blue smoke among white slabs… near the shingle mill… winter morning. Falling of a dry leaf might be heard… circular steel tears through a log. Slope of woodland… brown… soft… tinge

FASTEN black eyes on me. I ask nothing of you under the peach trees, Fasten your black eyes in my gray with the spear of a storm. The air under the peach blossoms is

CLOWNS DYINGFIVE circus clowns dying this year, morning newspapers told their lives, how each one horizontal in a last gesture of hands arranged by an undertaker, shook thousands into convulsions of laughter from behind

NEITHER rose leaves gathered in a jar-respectably in Boston-these-nor drops of Christ blood for a chalice-decently in Philadelphia or Baltimore. Cinders-these-hissing in a marl and lime of Chicago-also these-the howling of northwest winds across

THREE tailors of Tooley Street wrote: We, the People. The names are forgotten. It is a joke in ghosts. Cutters or bushelmen or armhole basters, they sat Cross-legged stitching, snatched at scissors, stole each

ONE by one lights of a skyscraper fling their checkering cross work on the velvet gown of night. I believe the skyscraper loves night as a woman and brings her playthings she asks for,

Women of night life amid the lights Where the line of your full, round throats Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes And the ring of your heart-deep laughter: It is much to

DUST of the feet And dust of the wheels, Wagons and people going, All day feet and wheels. Now. . . . . Only stars and mist A lonely policeman, Two cabaret dancers, Stars

SMASH down the cities. Knock the walls to pieces. Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses And homes Into loose piles of stone and lumber and black Burnt wood: You are the soldiers and we

AND this will be all? And the gates will never open again? And the dust and the wind will play around the rusty door hinges and the songs of October moan, Why-oh, why-oh? And

IN the loam we sleep, In the cool moist loam, To the lull of years that pass And the break of stars, From the loam, then, The soft warm loam, We rise: To shape

RED gold of pools, Sunset furrows six o’clock, And the farmer done in the fields And the cows in the barns with bulging udders. Take the cows and the farmer, Take the barns and

IN the night, when the sea-winds take the city in their arms, And cool the loud streets that kept their dust noon and afternoon; In the night, when the sea-birds call to the lights

To Certain Poets About to Die TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow, Over the dead child of a millionaire, And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank Which the

BABY vamps, is it harder work than it used to be? Are the new soda parlors worse than the old time saloons? Baby vamps, do you have jobs in the day time or is

FOR the second time in a year this lady with the white hands is brought to the west room second floor of a famous sanatorium. Her husband is a cornice manufacturer in an Iowa

I HAVE been watching the war map slammed up for Advertising in front of the newspaper office. Buttons red and yellow buttons blue and black buttons Are shoved back and forth across the map.

(Chirstmas Day, 1917)THE FIVE O’CLOCK prairie sunset is a strong man going to sleep after a long day in a cornfield. The red dust of a rusty crimson is fixed with two fingers of

BOTH were jailbirds; no speechmakers at all; speaking best with one foot on a brass rail; a beer glass in the left hand and the right hand employed for gestures. And both were lights

THE SNOW piles in dark places are gone. Pools by the railroad tracks shine clear. The gravel of all shallow places shines. A white pigeon reels and somersaults. Frogs plutter and squdge-and frogs beat

Open the door now. Go roll up the collar of your coat To walk in the changing scarf of mist. Tell your sins here to the pearl fog And know for once a deepening

STROLLING along By the teeming docks, I watch the ships put out. Black ships that heave and lunge And move like mastodons Arising from lethargic sleep. The fathomed harbor Calls them not nor dares

I wrote a poem on the mist And a woman asked me what I meant by it. I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist, how pearl and gray of

I heard a woman’s lips Speaking to a companion Say these words: “A woman what hustles Never keeps nothin’ For all her hustlin’. Somebody always gets What she goes on the street for. If

Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town. Far off Everybody loved her. So we all love a wild girl keeping a hold On a dream she wants. Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.

SMOKE of autumn is on it all. The streamers loosen and travel. The red west is stopped with a gray haze. They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks, They make a long-tailed

We look on the shoulders filling the stage of the Chicago Auditorium. A fat mayor has spoken much English and the mud of his speech is crossed with quicksilver hisses elusive and rapid from

THE BRASS medallion profile of your face I keep always. It is not jingling with loose change in my pockets. It is not stuck up in a show place on the office wall. I

COOL your heels on the rail of an observation car. Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour. Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops,

THE CHILD Margaret begins to write numbers on a Saturday morning, the first numbers formed under her wishing child fingers. All the numbers come well-born, shaped in figures assertive for a frieze in a

IN the old wars drum of hoofs and the beat of shod feet. In the new wars hum of motors and the tread of rubber tires. In the wars to come silent wheels and

The child’s wonder At the old moon Comes back nightly. She points her finger To the far silent yellow thing Shining through the branches Filtering on the leaves a golden sand, Crying with her

LET down your braids of hair, lady. Cross your legs and sit before the looking-glass And gaze long on lines under your eyes. Life writes; men dance. And you know how men pay women.

IF I had a million lives to live and a million deaths to die in a million humdrum worlds, I’d like to change my name and have a new house number to go by

HOW much do you love me, a million bushels? Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more. And to-morrow maybe only half a bushel? To-morrow maybe not even a half a bushel.

I AM the mist, the impalpable mist, Back of the thing you seek. My arms are long, Long as the reach of time and space. Some toil and toil, believing, Looking now and again

AFTER the last red sunset glimmer, Black on the line of a low hill rise, Formed into moving shadows, I saw A plowboy and two horses lined against the gray, Plowing in the dusk

THERE is a blue star, Janet, Fifteen years’ ride from us, If we ride a hundred miles an hour. There is a white star, Janet, Forty years’ ride from us, If we ride a

AMONG the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July, I read your heart in a book. And your mouth of blue pansy-I know somewhere I have

THEY have painted and sung The women washing their hair, And the plaits and strands in the sun, And the golden combs And the combs of elephant tusks And the combs of buffalo horn

THE HORSE’S name was Remorse. There were people said, “Gee, what a nag!” And they were Edgar Allan Poe bugs and so They called him Remorse. When he was a gelding He flashed his

IF you never came with a pigeon rainbow purple Shining in the six o’clock September dusk: If the red sumach on the autumn roads Never danced on the flame of your eyelashes: If the

DEATH comes once, let it be easy. Ring one bell for me once, let it go at that. Or ring no bell at all, better yet. Sing one song if I die. Sing John

A MILLION young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads, And the million are now under soil and their rottening flesh will in the years feed roots of blood-red roses.

Let us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she married a corporation lawyer who picked her from a Ziegfeld chorus. Before then she never took anybody’s money and paid for her

THE owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo From building and battered paving-stone. The headlight scoffs at the mist, And fixes its yellow rays in the cold slow rain; Against a pane I press

ALL day long in fog and wind, The waves have flung their beating crests Against the palisades of adamant. My boy, he went to sea, long and long ago, Curls of brown were slipping

I GIVE the undertakers permission to haul my body To the graveyard and to lay away all, the head, the Feet, the hands, all: I know there is something left Over they can not

BORN a million years ago you stay here a million years… Watching the women come and live and be laid away… You and they thin-gray thin-dusk lovely. So it goes: either the early morning

RINGS of iron gray smoke; a woman’s steel face… looking… looking. Funnels of an ocean liner negotiating a fog night; pouring a taffy mass down the wind; layers of soot on the top deck;

MARY has a thingamajig clamped on her ears And sits all day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in. Flashes and flashes-voices and voices calling for ears to pour words in Faces at the

WHILE the hum and the hurry Of passing footfalls Beat in my ear like the restless surf Of a wind-blown sea, A soul came to me Out of the look on a face. Eyes

THIS is the song I rested with: The right shoulder of a strong man I leaned on. The face of the rain that drizzled on the short neck of a canal boat. The eyes

THE BRIDGE says: Come across, try me; see how good I am. The big rock in the river says: Look at me; learn how to stand up. The white water says: I go on;

I WAITED today for a freight train to pass. Cattle cars with steers butting their horns against the Bars, went by. And a half a dozen hoboes stood on bumpers between Cars. Well, the

AFTER you have spent all the money modistes and manicures and mannikins will take for fixing you over into a thing the people on the streets call proud and beautiful, After the shops and

HE lived on the wings of storm. The ashes are in Chihuahua. Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado Sprang a vengeance of Slav miners, Italians, Scots, Cornishmen, Yanks. Killings ran under the

They offer you many things, I a few. Moonlight on the play of fountains at night With water sparkling a drowsy monotone, Bare-shouldered, smiling women and talk And a cross-play of loves and adulteries

The long beautiful night of the wind and rain in April, The long night hanging down from the drooping branches of the top of a birch tree, Swinging, swaying, to the wind for a

THE PAWN-SHOP man knows hunger, And how far hunger has eaten the heart Of one who comes with an old keepsake. Here are wedding rings and baby bracelets, Scarf pins and shoe buckles, jeweled

A LONE gray bird, Dim-dipping, far-flying, Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults Of night and the sea And the stars and storms. Out over the darkness it wavers and hovers, Out into

THEY have taken the ball of earth and made it a little thing. They were held to the land and horses; they were held to the little seas. They have changed and shaped and

My head knocks against the stars. My feet are on the hilltops. My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of Universal life. Down in the sounding foam of primal things I Reach my

Sobs En Route to a Penitentiary GOOD-BY now to the streets and the clash of wheels and Locking hubs, The sun coming on the brass buckles and harness knobs. The muscles of the horses

I SHALL cry God to give me a broken foot. I shall ask for a scar and a slashed nose. I shall take the last and the worst. I shall be eaten by gray

On the breakwater in the summer dark, a man and a girl are sitting, She across his knee and they are looking face into face Talking to each other without words, singing rythms in

THERE are no handles upon a language Whereby men take hold of it And mark it with signs for its remembrance. It is a river, this language, Once in a thousand years Breaking a

TODAY I will let the old boat stand Where the sweep of the harbor tide comes in To the pulse of a far, deep-steady sway. And I will rest and dream and sit on

CRIMSON is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold, Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire. (A great man I know is dead and while he lies

IF I should pass the tomb of Jonah I would stop there and sit for awhile; Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark And came out alive after all. If I

I TOOK away three pictures. One was a white gull forming a half-mile arch from the pines toward Waukegan. One was a whistle in the little sandhills, a bird crying either to the sunset

(Handbook for Quarreling Lovers)I THOUGHT of offering you apothegms. I might have said, “Dogs bark and the wind carries it away.” I might have said, “He who would make a door of gold must

LET the crows go by hawking their caw and caw. They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere. Let ’em hawk their caw and caw. Let the woodpecker drum and drum on

THERE was a high majestic fooling Day before yesterday in the yellow corn. And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn There will be high majestic fooling. The ears ripen in late summer And

LONG ago I learned how to sleep, In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away, In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and

I HAVE lived in many half-worlds myself… and so I know you. I leaned at a deck rail watching a monotonous sea, the same circling birds and the same plunge of furrows carved by

YELLOW dust on a bumble Bee’s wing, Grey lights in a woman’s Asking eyes, Red ruins in the changing Sunset embers: I take you and pile high The memories. Death will break her claws

THE shadows of the ships Rock on the crest In the low blue lustre Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide. A long brown bar at the dip of the sky Puts an

I KNOW a Jew fish crier down on Maxwell Street with a Voice like a north wind blowing over corn stubble In January. He dangles herring before prospective customers evincing A joy identical with

INTO the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold night, there is a man goes into the dark and the cold and when he comes back to his people he brings

ALL I can give you is broken-face gargoyles. It is too early to sing and dance at funerals, Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker humming a lullaby and

I SAW a famous man eating soup. I say he was lifting a fat broth Into his mouth with a spoon. His name was in the newspapers that day Spelled out in tall black

MANY things I might have said today. And I kept my mouth shut. So many times I was asked To come and say the same things Everybody was saying, no end To the yes-yes,

KEEP a red heart of memories Under the great gray rain sheds of the sky, Under the open sun and the yellow gloaming embers. Remember all paydays of lilacs and songbirds; All starlights of

FIVE geese deploy mysteriously. Onward proudly with flagstaffs, Hearses with silver bugles, Bushels of plum-blossoms dropping For ten mystic web-feet- Each his own drum-major, Each charged with the honor Of the ancient goose nation,

(For Paula)THE GRIP of the ice is gone now. The silvers chase purple. The purples tag silver. They let out their runners Here where summer says to the lilies: “Wish and be wistful, Circle

THE BABY moon, a canoe, a silver papoose canoe, sails and sails in the Indian west. A ring of silver foxes, a mist of silver foxes, sit and sit around the Indian moon. One

WHEN the jury files in to deliver a verdict after weeks of direct and cross examinations, hot clashes of lawyers and cool decisions of the judge, There are points of high silence-twiddling of thumbs

I WISH to God I never saw you, Mag. I wish you never quit your job and came along with me. I wish we never bought a license and a white dress For you

THERE was a woman tore off a red velvet gown And slashed the white skin of her right shoulder And a crimson zigzag wrote a finger nail hurry. There was a woman spoke six

YOUR bow swept over a string, and a long low note Quivered to the air. (A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child perfect Learning to suck milk.) Your bow ran fast over

SHE sits in the dust at the walls And makes cigars, Bending at the bench With fingers wage-anxious, Changing her sweat for the day’s pay. Now the noon hour has come, And she leans

JOY… weaving two violet petals for a coat lapel… painting on a slab of night sky a Christ face… slipping new brass keys into rusty iron locks and shouldering till at last the door

DOWN between the walls of shadow Where the iron laws insist, The hunger voices mock. The worn wayfaring men With the hunched and humble shoulders, Throw their laughter into toil.

REMEMBRANCE for a great man is this. The newsies are pitching pennies. And on the copper disk is the man’s face. Dead lover of boys, what do you ask for now?

THE MOUTH of this man is a gaunt strong mouth. The head of this man is a gaunt strong head. The jaws of this man are bone of the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians. The

A STONE face higher than six horses stood five thousand Years gazing at the world seeming to clutch a secret. A boy passes and throws a niggerhead that chips off the End of the

RED barns and red heifers spot the green Grass circles around Omaha-the farmers Haul tanks of cream and wagon loads of cheese. Shale hogbacks across the river at Council Bluffs-and shanties hang by an

IN the cool of the night time The clocks pick off the points And the mainsprings loosen. They will need winding. One of these days… they will need winding. Rabelais in red boards, Walt

BEES and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture corner-a skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters. And I ask no

IT’S a lean car… a long-legged dog of a car… a gray-ghost eagle car. The feet of it eat the dirt of a road… the wings of it eat the hills. Danny the driver

I AM making a Cartoon of a Woman. She is the People. She is the Great Dirty Mother. And Many Children hang on her Apron, crawl at her Feet, snuggle at her Breasts.

SELL me a violin, mister, of old mysterious wood. Sell me a fiddle that has kissed dark nights on the forehead where men kiss sisters they love. Sell me dried wood that has ached

THEY were calling certain styles of whiskers by the name of “lilacs.” And another manner of beard assumed in their chatter a verbal guise Of “mutton chops,” “galways,” “feather dusters.” Metaphors such as these

LET it go on; let the love of this hour be poured out till all the answers are made, the last dollar spent and the last blood gone. Time runs with an ax and

TWENTY men stand watching the muckers. Stabbing the sides of the ditch Where clay gleams yellow, Driving the blades of their shovels Deeper and deeper for the new gas mains Wiping sweat off their

STORMS have beaten on this point of land And ships gone to wreck here And the passers-by remember it With talk on the deck at night As they near it. Fists have beaten on

THE MILK drops on your chin, Helga, Must not interfere with the cranberry red of your cheeks Nor the sky winter blue of your eyes. Let your mammy keep hands off the chin. This

I THOUGHT of killing myself because I am only a bricklayer and you a woman who loves the man who runs a drug store. I don’t care like I used to; I lay bricks

PIETRO has twenty red and blue balloons on a string. They flutter and dance pulling Pietro’s arm. A nickel apiece is what they sell for. Wishing children tag Pietro’s heels. He sells out and

I WILL read ashes for you, if you ask me. I will look in the fire and tell you from the gray lashes And out of the red and black tongues and stripes, I

The monotone of the rain is beautiful, And the sudden rise and slow relapse Of the long multitudinous rain. The sun on the hills is beautiful, Or a captured sunset sea-flung, Bannered with fire

YOUR eyes and the valley are memories. Your eyes fire and the valley a bowl. It was here a moonrise crept over the timberline. It was here we turned the coffee cups upside down.

I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell Me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of Thousands of men. They all shook their

THE HIGH horses of the sea broke their white riders On the walls that held and counted the hours The wind lasted. Two landbirds looked on and the north and the east Looked on

HOKUSAI’S portrait of himself Tells what his hat was like And his arms and legs. The only faces Are a river and a mountain And two laughing farmers. The smile of Hokusai is under

IN the moonlight under a shag-bark hickory tree Watching the yellow shadows melt in hoof-pools, Listening to the yes and the no of a woman’s hands, I kept my guess why the night was

Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia, Scarlet Chinese talker of summer. Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula’s hair, And fluff of white from a cottonwood.

THE WEST window is a panel of marching onions. Five new lilacs nod to the wind and fence boards. The rain dry fence boards, the stained knot holes, heliograph a peace. (How long ago

AMONG the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and Red crag and was amazed; On the beach where the long push under the endless tide Maneuvers, I stood silent; Under the stars on

THERE will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart, The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust. A spider will make a silver string nest in the darkest, warmest corner of it. The

BEND low again, night of summer stars. So near you are, sky of summer stars, So near, a long arm man can pick off stars, Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,

THE DOME of the capitol looks to the Potomac river. Out of haze over the sunset, Out of a smoke rose gold: One star shines over the sunset. Night takes the dome and the

PENCILS Telling where the wind comes from open a story. Pencils Telling where the wind goes end a story. These eager pencils Come to a stop .. only.. when the stars high over Come

SUNDAY night and the park policemen tell each other it Is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan. A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach Farms of

THE BALLOONS hang on wires in the Marigold Gardens. They spot their yellow and gold, they juggle their blue and red, they float their faces on the face of the sky. Balloon face eaters

HAVE me in the blue and the sun. Have me on the open sea and the mountains. When I go into the grass of the sea floor, I will go alone. This is where

I AM a copper wire slung in the air, Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow. Night and day I keep singing humming and thrumming: It is love

I AM the people the mob the crowd the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is Done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of

NOTHING else in this song-only your face. Nothing else here-only your drinking, night-gray eyes. The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel. I stand on the pier and sing how I

THE WISHES on this child’s mouth Came like snow on marsh cranberries; The tamarack kept something for her; The wind is ready to help her shoes. The north has loved her; she will be

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders; They tell me you are wicked and I

PEA pods cling to stems. Neponset, the village, Clings to the Burlington railway main line. Terrible midnight limiteds roar through Hauling sleepers to the Rockies and Sierras. The earth is slightly shaken And Neponset

TWO Swede families live downstairs and an Irish policeman upstairs, and an old soldier, Uncle Joe. Two Swede boys go upstairs and see Joe. His wife is dead, his only son is dead, and

CHATTER of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running water-sheer waters showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains. And the long willows drowse on the shoulders

IF we were such and so, the same as these, Maybe we too would be slingers and sliders, Tumbling half over in the water mirrors, Tumbling half over at the horse heads of the

The young child, Christ, is straight and wise And asks questions of the old men, questions Found under running water for all children And found under shadows thrown on still waters By tall trees

EVERY year Emily Dickinson sent one friend The first arbutus bud in her garden. In a last will and testament Andrew Jackson Remembered a friend with the gift of George Washington’s pocket spy-glass. Napoleon

A GOLDWING moth is between the scissors and the ink bottle on the desk. Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb and a flame wire. The wings are a soft

THE PEACE of great doors be for you. Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs. Wait for the great hinges. The peace of great churches be for you, Where the players of loft

WANDERING oversea dreamer, Hunting and hoarse, Oh daughter and mother, Oh daughter of ashes and mother of blood, Child of the hair let down, and tears, Child of the cross in the south And

THE LAW says you and I belong to each other, George. The law says you are mine and I am yours, George. And there are a million miles of white snowstorms, a million furnaces

HERE in a cage the dollars come down. To the click of a tube the dollars tumble. And out of a mouth the dollars run. I finger the dollars, Paper and silver, Thousands a

FIRST I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind. Next I would like to write one for you to sit on a hill

EMPTY battlefields keep their phantoms. Grass crawls over old gun wheels And a nodding Canada thistle flings a purple Into the summer’s southwest wind, Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet, Reaching

I HAVE ransacked the encyclopedias And slid my fingers among topics and titles Looking for you. And the answer comes slow. There seems to be no answer. I shall ask the next banana peddler

Sling me under the sea. Pack me down in the salt and wet. No farmer’s plow shall touch my bones. No Hamlet hold my jaws and speak How jokes are gone and empty is

I CRIED over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts. The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of

SIX street ends come together here. They feed people and wagons into the center. In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags, Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies. Six

I WILL keep you and bring hands to hold you against a great hunger. I will run a spear in you for a great gladness to die with. I will stab you between the

Many birds and the beating of wings Make a flinging reckless hum In the early morning at the rocks Above the blue pool Where the gray shadows swim lazy. In your blue eyes, O

I REMEMBER the Chillicothe ball players grappling the Rock Island ball players in a sixteen-inning game ended by darkness. And the shoulders of the Chillicothe players were a red smoke against the sundown and

YOU never come back. I say good-by when I see you going in the doors, The hopeless open doors that call and wait And take you then for how many cents a day? How

THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson. The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab. And the people who sin the sins of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

THE FINE cloth of your love might be a fabric of Egypt, Something Sinbad, the sailor, took away from robbers, Something a traveler with plenty of money might pick up And bring home and

THE BUFFALOES are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone. Those who saw the buffaloes by thousands and how they pawed the prairie sod into dust with their hoofs, their great heads

DREAMS in the dusk, Only dreams closing the day And with the day’s close going back To the gray things, the dark things, The far, deep things of dreamland. Dreams, only dreams in the

LIPS half-willing in a doorway. Lips half-singing at a window. Eyes half-dreaming in the walls. Feet half-dancing in a kitchen. Even the clocks half-yawn the hours And the farmers make half-answers.

GOLD of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon, Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue, Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts, Shining five and six in a row

In western fields of corn and northern timber lands, They talk about me, a saloon with a soul, The soft red lights, the long curving bar, The leather seats and dim corners, Tall brass

THERE are places I go when I am strong. One is a marsh pool where I used to go with a long-ear hound-dog. One is a wild crabapple tree; I was there a moonlight

LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles over our house and whistling a wolf Song under the eaves. I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the

THE TELESCOPE picks off star dust On the clean steel sky and sends it to me. The telephone picks off my voice and Sends it cross country a thousand miles. The eyes in my

NAPOLEON shifted, Restless in the old sarcophagus And murmured to a watchguard: “Who goes there?” “Twenty-one million men, Soldiers, armies, guns, Twenty-one million Afoot, horseback, In the air, Under the sea.” And Napoleon turned

IN Abraham Lincoln’s city, Where they remember his lawyer’s shingle, The place where they brought him Wrapped in battle flags, Wrapped in the smoke of memories From Tallahassee to the Yukon, The place now

IT’S going to come out all right—do you know? The sun, the birds, the grass—they know. They get along—and we’ll get along. Some days will be rainy and you will sit waiting And the

OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this: You took little children away from the sun and the dew, And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great

THE GRAVE of Alexander Hamilton is in Trinity yard at the end of Wall Street. The grave of Robert Fulton likewise is in Trinity yard where Wall Street stops. And in this yard stenogs,

STYLE go ahead talking about style. You can tell where a man gets his style just As you can tell where Pavlowa got her legs Or Ty Cobb his batting eye. Go on talking.

TEN minutes now I have been looking at this. I have gone by here before and wondered about it. This is a bronze memorial of a famous general Riding horseback with a flag and

WHAT cry of peach blossoms let loose on the air today I heard with my face thrown in the pink-white of it all? in the red whisper of it all? What man I heard

THE DOUBLE moon, one on the high back drop of the west, one on the curve of the river face, The sky moon of fire and the river moon of water, I am taking

WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek. Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices, Gamblers with red neckties in the night streets, The

IN the morning, a Sunday morning, shadows of sea and adumbrants of rock in her eyes… horseback in leather boots and leather gauntlets by the sea. In the evening, a Sunday evening, a rope

SNOW took us away from the smoke valleys into white mountains, we saw velvet blue cows eating a vermillion grass and they gave us a pink milk. Snow changes our bones into fog streamers

To the Williamson Brothers HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue Asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors. Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching Play of sun-fire to their skin

THERE was a wild pigeon came often to Hinkley’s timber. Gray wings that wrote their loops and triangles on the walnuts and the hazel. There was a wild pigeon. There was a summer came

BURY this old Illinois farmer with respect. He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields. Now he goes on a long sleep. The wind he listened to

JESUS emptied the devils of one man into forty hogs and the hogs took the edge of a high rock and dropped off and down into the sea: a mob. The sheep on the

Shaken, The blossoms of lilac, And shattered, The atoms of purple. Green dip the leaves, Darker the bark, Longer the shadows. Sheer lines of poplar Shimmer with masses of silver And down in a

MRS. GABRIELLE GIOVANNITTI comes along Peoria Street Every morning at nine o’clock With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes Looking straight ahead to find the way for her old feet.

FACES of two eternities keep looking at me. One is Omar Khayam and the red stuff Wherein men forget yesterday and to-morrow And remember only the voices and songs, The stories, newspapers and fights

WHAT does the hangman think about When he goes home at night from work? When he sits down with his wife and Children for a cup of coffee and a Plate of ham and

I. CHICKENS I am The Great White Way of the city: When you ask what is my desire, I answer: “Girls fresh as country wild flowers, With young faces tired of the cows and

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

IA STORM of white petals, Buds throwing open baby fists Into hands of broad flowers. IIRed roses running upward, Clambering to the clutches of life Soaked in crimson. IIIRabbles of tattered leaves Holding golden

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two Days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.] COME to me only with playthings now. . . A

THE SHALE and water thrown together so-so first of all, Then a potter’s hand on the wheel and his fingers shaping the jug; out of the mud a mouth and a handle; Slimpsy, loose

HATS, where do you belong? what is under you? On the rim of a skyscraper’s forehead I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats: Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle

TWO fishes swimming in the sea, Two birds flying in the air, Two chisels on an anvil-maybe. Beaten, hammered, laughing blue steel to each other-maybe. Sure I would rather be a chisel with you

I SAW a telegram handed a two hundred pound man at a desk. And the little scrap of paper charged the air like a set of crystals in a chemist’s tube to a whispering

TOMB of a millionaire, A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen, Place of the dead where they spend every year The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars For upkeep and flowers To keep fresh the memory of

RUM tiddy um, tiddy um, tiddy um tum tum. My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves. I feel like tickling you under the chin-honey-and a-asking: Why Does a Chicken Cross

Close-mouthed you sat five thousand years and never Let out a whisper. Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you Answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips Never talking. Not one croak of anything

IN a jeweler’s shop I saw a man beating Out thin sheets of gold. I heard a woman Laugh many years ago. Under a peach tree I saw petals scattered .. torn strips of

I cannot tell you now; When the wind’s drive and whirl Blow me along no longer, And the wind’s a whisper at last Maybe I’ll tell you then some other time. When the rose’s

I ASKED the Mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week. And the Mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in

DESOLATE and lone All night long on the lake Where fog trails and mist creeps, The whistle of a boat Calls and cries unendingly, Like some lost child In tears and trouble Hunting the

WHAT do we see here in the sand dunes of the white Moon alone with our thoughts, Bill, Alone with our dreams, Bill, soft as the women tying Scarves around their heads dancing, Alone

I HAVE kept all, not one is thrown away, not one given to the ragman, not one thrust in a corner with a “P-f-f.” The red ones and the blue, the long ones in

THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender. Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the

SOMEWHERE you and I remember we came. Stairways from the sea and our heads dripping. Ladders of dust and mud and our hair snarled. Rags of drenching mist and our hands clawing, climbing. You

MAKE war songs out of these; Make chants that repeat and weave. Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns; Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.

PLAY it across the table. What if we steal this city blind? If they want any thing let ’em nail it down. Harness bulls, dicks, front office men, And the high goats up on

THERE’S a hole in the bottom of the sea. Do you want affidavits? There’s a man in the moon with money for you. Do you want affidavits? There are ten dancing girls in a

MANY ways to spell good night. Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes. They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit. Rockets

THE SHEETS of night mist travel a long valley. I know why you came at sundown in a scarf mist. What was it we touched asking nothing and asking all? How many times can

NEW neighbors came to the corner house at Congress and Green streets. The look of their clean white curtains was the same as the rim of a nun’s bonnet. One way was an oyster

I DON’T blame the kettle drums-they are hungry. And the snare drums-I know what they want-they are empty too. And the harring booming bass drums-they are hungriest of all.. . . The howling spears

HAVE I broken the smaller tabernacles, O Lord? And in the destruction of these set up the greater and massive, the everlasting tabernacles? I know nothing today, what I have done and why, O

THE WIND stops, the wind begins. The wind says stop, begin. A sea shovel scrapes the sand floor. The shovel changes, the floor changes. The sandpipers, maybe they know. Maybe a three-pointed foot can