All Poems

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LET it go on; let the love of this hour be poured out till all the answers are made, the last dollar spent and the last blood gone.

Time runs with an ax and a hammer, time slides down the hallways with a pass-key and a master-key, and time gets by, time wins.

Legends

© Carl Sandburg

CLOWNS DYINGFIVE circus clowns dying this year, morning newspapers told their lives, how each one horizontal in a last gesture of hands arranged by an undertaker, shook thousands into convulsions of laughter from behind rouge-red lips and powder-white face.

STEAMBOAT BILLWhen the boilers of the Robert E. Lee exploded, a steamboat winner of many races on the Mississippi went to the bottom of the river and never again saw the wharves of Natchez and New Orleans.
And a legend lives on that two gamblers were blown toward the sky and during their journey laid bets on which of the two would go higher and which would be first to set foot on the turf of the earth again.

Leather Leggings

© Carl Sandburg

THEY have taken the ball of earth
and made it a little thing.

They were held to the land and horses;

Lawyer

© Carl Sandburg

WHEN the jury files in to deliver a verdict after weeks of direct and cross examinations, hot clashes of lawyers and cool decisions of the judge,
There are points of high silencetwiddling of thumbs is at an endbailiffs near cuspidors take fresh chews of tobacco and waitand the clock has a chance for its ticking to be heard.
A lawyer for the defense clears his throat and holds himself ready if the word is Guilty to enter motion for a new trial, speaking in a soft voice, speaking in a voice slightly colored with bitter wrongs mingled with monumental patience, speaking with mythic Atlas shoulders of many preposterous, unjust circumstances.

Laughing Corn

© Carl Sandburg

THERE was a high majestic fooling
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.

And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn

Last Answers

© Carl Sandburg

I wrote a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.

Knucks

© Carl Sandburg

IN Abraham Lincolns city,
Where they remember his lawyers shingle,
The place where they brought him
Wrapped in battle flags,

Kin

© Carl Sandburg

BROTHER, I am fire
Surging under the ocean floor.
I shall never meet you, brother--
Not for years, anyhow;

Killers

© Carl Sandburg

I AM singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:

Just Before April Came

© Carl Sandburg

THE SNOW piles in dark places are gone.
Pools by the railroad tracks shine clear.
The gravel of all shallow places shines.
A white pigeon reels and somersaults.

Jungheimer's

© Carl Sandburg

In western fields of corn and northern timber lands,
They talk about me, a saloon with a soul,
The soft red lights, the long curving bar,
The leather seats and dim corners,

June

© Carl Sandburg

Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,
Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.
Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's
hair,
And fluff of white from a cottonwood.

Jug

© Carl Sandburg

THE SHALE and water thrown together so-so first of all,
Then a potters hand on the wheel and his fingers shaping the jug; out of the mud a mouth and a handle;
Slimpsy, loose and ready to fall at a touch, fire plays on it, slow fire coaxing all the water out of the shale mix.
Dipped in glaze more fire plays on it till a molasses lava runs in waves, rises and retreats, a varnish of volcanoes.

Joliet

© Carl Sandburg

ON the one hand the steel works.
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Sante Fé trains and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west

John Ericsson Day Memorial, 1918

INTO the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold night, there is a man goes into the dark and the cold and when he comes back to his people he brings fire in his hands and they remember him in the years afterward as the fire bringerthey remember or forgetthe man whose head kept singing to the want of his home, the want of his people.

For this man there is no name thought ofhe has broken from jungles and the old oxen and the old wagonscircled the earth with shipsbelted the earth with steelswung with wings and a drumming motor in the high blue skyshot his words on a wireless way through shattering sea storms:out from the night and out from the jungles his head keeps singingthere is no road for him but on and on.

Jaws

SEVEN nations stood with their hands on the jaws of death.
It was the first week in August, Nineteen Hundred Fourteen.
I was listening, you were listening, the whole world was
listening,

Jack London and O. Henry

BOTH were jailbirds; no speechmakers at all; speaking best with one foot on a brass rail; a beer glass in the left hand and the right hand employed for gestures.

And both were lights snuffed out no warning no lingering:

Who knew the hearts of these boozefighters?

Jack

JACK was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten hours a day,
and his hands were tougher than sole leather.
He married a tough woman and they had eight children

Jabberers

I RISE out of my depths with my language.
You rise out of your depths with your language.

Two tongues from the depths,

It Is Much

Women of night life amid the lights
Where the line of your full, round throats
Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes
And the ring of your heart-deep laughter:
It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.