All Poems
/ page 2876 of 3210 /
Real Estate News
© Carl Sandburg
ARMOUR AVENUE was the name of this street and door signs on empty houses read The Silver Dollar, Swede Annie and the Christian names of madams such as Myrtle and Jenny.
Scrap iron, rags and bottles fill the front rooms hither and yon and signs in Yiddish say Abe Kaplan & Co. are running junk shops in whore houses of former times.
The segregated district, the Tenderloin, is here no more; the red-lights are gone; the ring of shovels handling scrap iron replaces the banging of pianos and the bawling songs of pimps.Chicago, 1915.
Questionnaire
© Carl Sandburg
HAVE I told any man to be a liar for my sake?
Have I sold ice to the poor in summer and coal to the poor in winter for the sake of daughters who nursed brindle bull terriers and led with a leash their dogs clothed in plaid wool jackets?
Have I given any man an earful too much of my talkor asked any man to take a snootful of booze on my account?
Have I put wool in my own ears when men tried to tell me what was good for me? Have I been a bum listener?
Have I taken dollars from the living and the unborn while I made speeches on the retributions that shadow the heels of the dishonest?
Have I done any good under cover? Or have I always put it in the show windows and the newspapers?
Put Off the Wedding Five Times and Nobody Comes to It
© Carl Sandburg
(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 knock a nail in every day.
So easy, so easy it would have been to inaugurate a high impetuous moment for you to look on before the final farewells were spoken.
Purple Martins
© Carl Sandburg
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 sun,
Proud and Beautiful
© Carl Sandburg
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 fingers have worn out all they have and know and can hope to have and know for the sake of making you what the people on the streets call proud and beautiful,
After there is absolutely nothing more to be done for the sake of staging you as a great enigmatic bird of paradise and they must all declare you to be proud and beautiful,
After you have become the last word in good looks, insofar as good looks may be fixed and formulated, then, why then, there is nothing more to it then, it is then you listen and see how voices and eyes declare you to be proud and beautiful
Prayers After World War
© Carl Sandburg
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,
Prairie Waters by Night
© Carl Sandburg
CHATTER of birds two by two raises a night song joining a litany of running watersheer waters showing the russet of old stones remembering many rains.
And the long willows drowse on the shoulders of the running water, and sleep from much music; joined songs of day-end, feathery throats and stony waters, in a choir chanting new psalms.
It is too much for the long willows when low laughter of a red moon comes down; and the willows drowse and sleep on the shoulders of the running water.
Prairie
© Carl Sandburg
I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Potomac Town in February
© Carl Sandburg
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; around, under, over, I go on.
A kneeling, scraggly pine says: I am here yet; they nearly got me last year.
A sliver of moon slides by on a high wind calling: I know why; Ill see you to-morrow; Ill tell you everything to-morrow.
Potomac River Mist
© Carl Sandburg
ALL the policemen, saloonkeepers and efficiency experts in Toledo knew Bern Dailey; secretary ten years when Whitlock was mayor.
Pickpockets, yeggs, three card men, he knew them all and how they flit from zone to zone, birds of wind and weather, singers, fighters, scavengers.
The Washington monument pointed to a new moon for us and a gang from over the river sang ragtime to a ukelele.
Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs
© Carl Sandburg
RUM tiddy um,
tiddy um,
tiddy um tum tum.
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.
Portrait of a Motor Car
© Carl Sandburg
ITS 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 dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep.
It is in Dannys life and runs in the blood of him
a lean gray-ghost car.
Portrait
© Carl Sandburg
(For S. A.)TO write one book in five years
or five books in one year,
to be the painter and the thing painted,
where are we, bo?
Population Drifts
© Carl Sandburg
NEW-MOWN hay smell and wind of the plain made her
a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in
them and her hands were tough for work and there
was passion for life in her womb.
Poppies
© Carl Sandburg
She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
In a loose white gown she walks
and a new child tugs at cords in her body.
Her head to the west at evening when the dew is creeping,
A shudder of gladness runs in her bones and torsal fiber:
She loves blood-red poppies for a garden to walk in.
Poems Done on a Late Night Car
© Carl Sandburg
Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination
upon the painted faces of women on
North Clark Street, Chicago
Plaster
© Carl Sandburg
I KNEW a real man once, says Agatha in the splendor of a shagbark hickory tree.
Did a man touch his lips to Agatha? Did a man hold her in his arms? Did a man only look at her and pass by?
Agatha, far past forty in a splendor of remembrance, says, I knew a real man once.
Pigeon
© Carl Sandburg
THE FLUTTER of blue pigeons wings
Under a river bridge
Hunting a clean dry arch,
A corner for a sleep
