All Poems

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Old Timers

© Carl Sandburg

I AM an ancient reluctant conscript.

On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.

JOHN BROWNS body under the morning stars.
Six feet of dust under the morning stars.
And a panorama of war performs itself
Over the six-foot stage of circling armies.
Room for Gettysburg, Wilderness, Chickamauga,
On a six-foot stage of dust.

North Atlantic

© Carl Sandburg

WHEN the sea is everywhere
from horizon to horizon ..
when the salt and blue
fill a circle of horizons ..

Nocturne In A Deserted Brickyard

© Carl Sandburg

Stuff of the moon
Runs on the lapping sand
Out to the longest shadows.
Under the curving willows,

Night Stuff

© Carl Sandburg

LISTEN a while, the moon is a lovely woman, a lonely woman, lost in a silver dress, lost in a circus riders silver dress.

Listen a while, the lake by night is a lonely woman, a lovely woman, circled with birches and pines mixing their green and white among stars shattered in spray clear nights.

I know the moon and the lake have twisted the roots under my heart the same as a lonely woman, a lovely woman, in a silver dress, in a circus riders silver dress.

Night MovementNew York

© Carl Sandburg

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 of the city,
The lights that cut on the skyline their name of a city;

New Feet

© Carl Sandburg

EMPTY battlefields keep their phantoms.
Grass crawls over old gun wheels
And a nodding Canada thistle flings a purple
Into the summers southwest wind,
Wrapping a root in the rust of a bayonet,
Reaching a blossom in rust of shrapnel.

New Farm Tractor

© Carl Sandburg

The rear axles hold the kick of twenty Missouri jackasses.

It is in the records of the patent office and the ads there is twenty horse power pull here.

Never Born

© Carl Sandburg

THE TIME has gone by.
The child is dead.
The child was never even born.
Why go on? Why so much as begin?

Neighbors

© Carl Sandburg

ON Forty First Street
near Eighth Avenue
a frame house wobbles.

Near Keokuk

© Carl Sandburg

THIRTY-TWO Greeks are dipping their feet in a creek.
Sloshing their bare feet in a cool flow of clear water.
All one midsummer day ten hours the Greeks
stand in leather shoes shoveling gravel.

My People

© Carl Sandburg

MY people are gray,
pigeon gray, dawn gray, storm gray.
I call them beautiful,
and I wonder where they are going.

Murmurings in a field hospital

© Carl Sandburg

COME to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .

Muckers

© Carl Sandburg

Of the twenty looking on
Ten murmer, "O, its a hell of a job,"
Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."

Moonset

LEAVES of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west.
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
The moons good-by ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark.

Monosyllabic

LET me be monosyllabic to-day, O Lord.
Yesterday I loosed a snarl of words on a fool,
on a child.
To-day, let me be monosyllabic a crony of old men
who wash sunlight in their fingers and
enjoy slow-pacing clocks.

Momus

Momus is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.

Mohammed Bek Hadjetlache

THIS Mohammedan colonel from the Caucasus yells with his voice and wigwags with his arms.
The interpreter translates, I was a friend of Kornilov, he asks me what to do and I tell him.
A stub of a man, this Mohammedan colonel a projectile shape a bald head hammered
Does he fight or do they put him in a cannon and shoot him at the enemy?

Mist Forms

THE SHEETS of night mist travel a long valley.
I know why you came at sundown in a scarf mist.

What was it we touched asking nothing and asking all?

Memoranda

THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.

Prairie roses, two of them, climb down the sides of a road ditch. In the clear pool they find their faces along stiff knives of grass, and cat-tails who speak and keep thoughts in beaver brown.

These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts; these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I turn my head and say good-by to no one who hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.