All Poems

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They All Want to Play Hamlet

© Carl Sandburg

THEY all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,

Theme In Yellow

© Carl Sandburg

I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters

The Year

© Carl Sandburg

IA STORM of white petals,
Buds throwing open baby fists
Into hands of broad flowers.

The Wind Sings Welcome in Early Spring

© Carl Sandburg

(For Paula)THE GRIP of the ice is gone now.
The silvers chase purple.
The purples tag silver.
They let out their runners

The Walking Man of Rodin

© Carl Sandburg

LEGS hold a torso away from the earth.
And a regular high poem of legs is here.
Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs
Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear

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, brings her a velvet gown,
And loves the white of her shoulders hidden under the dark feel of it all.

The masonry of steel looks to the night for somebody it loves,
He is a little dizzy and almost dances waiting dark

The Sins of Kalamazoo

© Carl Sandburg

THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.

The Sea Hold

© Carl Sandburg

THE SEA is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land five white dice rolled from a tube.

The Right to Grief

© Carl Sandburg

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 millionaire might order his secretary to
scratch off
And get cashed.

The Red Son

© Carl Sandburg

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.

The Plowboy

© Carl Sandburg

I shall remember you long,
Plowboy and horses against the sky in shadow.
I shall remember you and the picture
You made for me,
Turning the turf in the dusk
And haze of an April gloaming.

The Noon Hour

© Carl Sandburg

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.

The Mayor of Gary

© Carl Sandburg

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 the United States.
Go into the plants and you will see men sitting around doing nothingmachinery does everything, said the Mayor of Gary when I asked him about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.
And he wore cool cream pants, the Mayor of Gary, and white shoes, and a barber had fixed him up with a shampoo and a shave and he was easy and imperturbable though the government weather bureau thermometer said 96 and children were soaking their heads at bubbling fountains on the street corners.

The Liars

© Carl Sandburg

(March, 1919)A LIAR goes in fine clothes.
A liar goes in rags.
A liar is a liar, clothes or no clothes.
A liar is a liar and lives on the lies he tells and dies in a life of lies.

The Has-Been

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 nose from the stone face; he lets fly a

The Hangman at Home

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

The Great Hunt

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.

The Four Brothers

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.

The Answer

You have spoken the answer.
A child searches far sometimes
Into the red dust
On a dark rose leaf

Testament

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 put away.