Death poems
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To The Lady Crewe, Upon The Death Of Her Child
© Robert Herrick
Why, Madam, will ye longer weep,
Whenas your baby's lull'd asleep?
And, pretty child, feels now no more
Those pains it lately felt before.
Civilian and Soldier
© Wole Soyinka
My apparition rose from the fall of lead,
Declared, 'I am a civilian.' It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.
Dedication
© Wole Soyinka
Earth will not share the rafter's envy; dung floors
Break, not the gecko's slight skin, but its fall
Taste this soil for death and plumb her deep for life
Wars
© Carl Sandburg
IN the old wars drum of hoofs and the beat of shod feet.
In the new wars hum of motors and the tread of rubber tires.
In the wars to come silent wheels and whirr of rods not
yet dreamed out in the heads of men.
Two Neighbors
© Carl Sandburg
FACES of two eternities keep looking at me.
One is Omar Khayam and the red stuff
wherein men forget yesterday and to-morrow
and remember only the voices and songs,
To Beachey, 1912
© Carl Sandburg
RIDING against the east,
A veering, steady shadow
Purrs the motor-call
Of the man-bird
Timber Wings
© Carl Sandburg
THERE was a wild pigeon came often to Hinkleys timber.
Gray wings that wrote their loops and triangles on the walnuts and the hazel.
The Right to Grief
© Carl Sandburg
TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to
scratch off
And get cashed.
The Red Son
© Carl Sandburg
I LOVE your faces I saw the many years
I drank your milk and filled my mouth
With your home talk, slept in your house
And was one of you.
The Four Brothers
© Carl Sandburg
MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
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.
Mist Forms
© Carl Sandburg
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?
Memoir
© Carl Sandburg
We look on the shoulders filling the stage of the Chicago Auditorium.
A fat mayor has spoken much English and the mud of his speech is crossed with quicksilver hisses elusive and rapid from floor and gallery.
Mammy Hums
© Carl Sandburg
THIS is the song I rested with:
The right shoulder of a strong man I leaned on.
The face of the rain that drizzled on the short neck of a canal boat.
The eyes of a child who slept while death went over and under.
Localities
© Carl Sandburg
WAGON WHEEL GAP is a place I never saw
And Red Horse Gulch and the chutes of Cripple Creek.
Red-shirted miners picking in the sluices,
Jaws
© Carl Sandburg
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,
Crimson Changes People
© Carl Sandburg
DID I see a crucifix in your eyes
and nails and Roman soldiers
and a dusk Golgotha?
Clean Hands
© Carl Sandburg
IT is something to face the sun and know you are free.
To hold your head in the shafts of daylight slanting the earth
And know your heart has kept a promise and the blood runs clean:
It is something.
Circles of Doors
© Carl Sandburg
I LOVE him, I love him, ran the patter of her lips
And she formed his name on her tongue and sang
And she sent him word she loved him so much,
So much, and death was nothing; work, art, home,
