All Poems

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Two

© Carl Sandburg

Memory of you is . . . a blue spear of flower.
I cannot remember the name of it.
Alongside a bold dripping poppy is fire and silk.
And they cover you.

Troths

© Carl Sandburg

YELLOW dust on a bumble
bee's wing,
Grey lights in a woman's
asking eyes,

Trinity Place

© Carl Sandburg

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.

Trafficker

© Carl Sandburg

Among the shadows where two streets cross,
A woman lurks in the dark and waits
To move on when a policeman heaves in view.
Smiling a broken smile from a face

You handle dust going to a long country,
You know the secret behind your job is the same whether
you lower the coffin with modern, automatic machinery,
well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the
body is laid in by naked hands and then covered
by the shovels.

To Beachey, 1912

© Carl Sandburg

RIDING against the east,
A veering, steady shadow
Purrs the motor-call
Of the man-bird

To a Contemporary Bunkshooter

© Carl Sandburg

You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.

Timber Wings

© Carl Sandburg

THERE was a wild pigeon came often to Hinkleys timber.

Gray wings that wrote their loops and triangles on the walnuts and the hazel.

Throwbacks

© Carl Sandburg

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.

Throw Roses

© Carl Sandburg

THROW roses on the sea where the dead went down.
The roses speak to the sea,
And the sea to the dead.
Throw roses, O lovers
Let the leaves wash on the salt in the sun.

Threes

© Carl Sandburg

I WAS a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, FraternityI asked
why men die for words.

Three Violins

© Carl Sandburg

THREE violins are trying their hearts.
The piece is MacDowells Wild Rose.
And the time of the wild rose
And the leaves of the wild rose

Three Spring Notations on Bipeds

© Carl Sandburg

1THE DOWN drop of the blackbird,
The wing catch of arrested flight,
The stop midway and then off: off for triangles, circles, loops of new hieroglyphs
This is Aprils way: a woman:

Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn

© Carl Sandburg

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,

Three Ghosts

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

Three Balls

JABOWSKYS place is on a side street and only the rain washes the dusty three balls.
When I passed the window a month ago, there rested in proud isolation:
A family bible with hasps of brass twisted off, a wooden clock with pendulum gone,
And a porcelain crucifix with the glaze nicked where the left elbow of Jesus is represented.
I passed to-day and they were all there, resting in proud isolation, the clock and the crucifix saying no more and no less than before, and a yellow cat sleeping in a patch of sun alongside the family bible with the hasps off.
Only the rain washes the dusty three balls in front of Jabowskys place on a side street.

Thin Strips

IN a jewelers shop I saw a man beating
out thin sheets of gold. I heard a woman
laugh many years ago.

They Will Say

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 sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls

They Buy With an Eye to Looks

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 stick on the walls and say:

They Ask Each Other Where They Came From

AM I the river your white birds fly over?
Are you the green valley my silver channels roam?
The two of us a bowl of blue sky day time and a bowl of red stars night time?
Who picked you
out of the first great whirl of nothings
and threw you here?