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;