All Poems

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Bringers

© Carl Sandburg

COVER me over
In dusk and dust and dreams.

Cover me over

JOY weaving two violet petals for a coat lapel painting on a slab of night sky a Christ face slipping new brass keys into rusty iron locks and shouldering till at last the door gives and we are in a new room forever and ever violet petals, slabs, the Christ face, brass keys and new rooms.

are we near or far? is there anything else? who comes back? and why does love ask nothing and give all? and why is love rare as a tailed comet shaking guesses out of men at telescopes ten feet long? why does the mystery sit with its chin on the lean forearm of women in gray eyes and women in hazel eyes?

Branches

© Carl Sandburg

The long beautiful night of the wind and rain in April,
The long night hanging down from the drooping branches of the top of a birch tree,
Swinging, swaying, to the wind for a partner, to the rain for a partner.
What is the humming, swishing thing they sing in the morning now?
The rain, the wind, the swishing whispers of the long slim curve so little and so dark on the western morning sky these dancing girls here on an April early morning
They have had a long cool beautiful night of it with their partners learning this years song of April.

Boy and Father

© Carl Sandburg

THE BOY Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.
The leather law books of Alexanders father fill a room like hay in a barn.
Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books.

Blue Maroons

© Carl Sandburg

YOU slut, he flung at her.
It was more than a hundred times
He had thrown it into her face
And by this time it meant nothing to her.

Blue Island Intersection

© Carl Sandburg

SIX street ends come together here.
They feed people and wagons into the center.
In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags,
Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies.

Blizzard Notes

© Carl Sandburg

I DONT blame the kettle drumsthey are hungry.
And the snare drumsI know what they wantthey are empty too.
And the harring booming bass drumsthey are hungriest of all.. . .
The howling spears of the Northwest die down.
The lullabies of the Southwest get a chance, a mother song.
A cradle moon rides out of a torn hole in the ragbag top of the sky.

Bilbea

© Carl Sandburg

BILBEA, I was in Babylon on Saturday night.
I saw nothing of you anywhere.
I was at the old place and the other girls were there, but no Bilbea.

Between Two Hills

© Carl Sandburg

The prayers are said
And the people rest
For sleep is there
And the touch of dreams
Is over all.

Basket

© Carl Sandburg

SPEAK, sir, and be wise.
Speak choosing your words, sir, like an old woman over a bushel of apples.

Bas-Relief

© Carl Sandburg

FIVE geese deploy mysteriously.
Onward proudly with flagstaffs,
Hearses with silver bugles,
Bushels of plum-blossoms dropping

Band Concert

© Carl Sandburg

BAND concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints flung like sprays of cherry blossoms. And gigglers, God knows, gigglers, rivaling the pony whinnies of the Livery Stable Blues.

Cowboy rags and nigger rags. And boys driving sorrel horses hurl a cornfield laughter at the girls in dresses, summer-white dresses. Amid the cornet staccato and the tuba oompa, gigglers, God knows, gigglers daffy with lifes razzle dazzle.

Baltic Fog Notes

© Carl Sandburg

(Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rats neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,

Balloon Faces

© Carl Sandburg

THE BALLOONS hang on wires in the Marigold Gardens.
They spot their yellow and gold, they juggle their blue and red, they float their faces on the face of the sky.
Balloon face eaters sit by hundreds reading the eat cards, asking, What shall we eat?and the waiters, Have you ordered? they are sixty ballon faces sifting white over the tuxedoes.
Poets, lawyers, ad men, mason contractors, smartalecks discussing educated jackasses, here they put crabs into their balloon faces.

Back Yard

Shine on, O moon of summer.
Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,
All silver under your rain to-night.

Baby Vamps

BABY vamps, is it harder work than it used to be?
Are the new soda parlors worse than the old time saloons?
Baby vamps, do you have jobs in the day time or is this all you do? do you come out only at night?
In the winter at the skating rinks, in the summer at the roller coaster parks,

Baby Toes

THERE is a blue star, Janet,
Fifteen years ride from us,
If we ride a hundred miles an hour.

Baby Face

WHITE MOON comes in on a baby face.
The shafts across her bed are flimmering.

Out on the land White Moon shines,

Aztec

You came from the Aztecs
With a copper on your fore-arms
Tawnier than a sunset
Saying good-by to an even river.

At a Window

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,