All Poems

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Pick Offs

© Carl Sandburg

THE TELESCOPE picks off star dust
on the clean steel sky and sends it to me.

The telephone picks off my voice and

Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification BureauYOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and

People With Proud Chins

© Carl Sandburg

I TELL them where the wind comes from,
Where the music goes when the fiddle is in the box.

KidsI saw one with a proud chin, a sleepyhead,

People Who Must

© Carl Sandburg

I PAINTED on the roof of a skyscraper.
I painted a long while and called it a days work.
The people on a corner swarmed and the traffic cops whistle never let up all afternoon.
They were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way

Pennsylvania

© Carl Sandburg

I HAVE been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and the Hocking Valleys.

In the blue Susquehanna

Pencils

© Carl Sandburg

PENCILS
telling where the wind comes from
open a story.

Pearl Fog

© Carl Sandburg

Open the door now.
Go roll up the collar of your coat
To walk in the changing scarf of mist.

Peach Blossoms

© Carl Sandburg

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

Paula

© Carl Sandburg

NOTHING else in this songonly your face.
Nothing else hereonly your drinking, night-gray eyes.

The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel.

Passers-By

© Carl Sandburg

Yes,
Written on
Your mouths
And your throats
I read them
When you passed by.

Panels

© Carl Sandburg

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 the knee drifts here and a blizzard howling at the knot holes, whistling winter war drums?)

Pals

© Carl Sandburg

Take a hold now
On the silver handles here,
Six silver handles,
One for each of his old pals.

Palladiums

© Carl Sandburg

IN the newspaper officewho are the spooks?
Who wears the mythic coat invisible?

Who pussyfoots from desk to desk

Out of White Lips

© Carl Sandburg

OUT of white lips a question: Shall seven million dead ask for their blood a little land for the living wives and children, a little land for the living brothers and sisters?

Out of white lips:Shall they have only air that sweeps round the earth for breath of their nostrils and no footing on the dirt of the earth for their battle-drabbed, battle-soaked shoes?

Ossawatomie

I DONT know how he came,
shambling, dark, and strong.

He stood in the city and told men:

On the Way

You have heard the mob laughed at?
I ask you: Is not the mob rough as the mountains are
rough?
And all things human rise from the mob and relapse and
rise again as rain to the sea.

On The Breakwater

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
silence to each other.

Omaha

RED barns and red heifers spot the green
grass circles around Omahathe farmers
haul tanks of cream and wagon loads of cheese.

Old-fashioned Requited Love

I HAVE ransacked the encyclopedias
And slid my fingers among topics and titles
Looking for you.

Old Woman

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 my forehead
And drowsily look on the walls and sidewalks.