Great poems
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They Will Say
© Carl Sandburg
OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls
They Ask Each Other Where They Came From
© Carl Sandburg
AM I the river your white birds fly over?
Are you the green valley my silver channels roam?
The two of us a bowl of blue sky day time and a bowl of red stars night time?
Who picked you
out of the first great whirl of nothings
and threw you here?
The Year
© Carl Sandburg
IA STORM of white petals,
Buds throwing open baby fists
Into hands of broad flowers.
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 Noon Hour
© Carl Sandburg
SHE sits in the dust at the walls
And makes cigars,
Bending at the bench
With fingers wage-anxious,
Changing her sweat for the day's pay.
The Great Hunt
© Carl Sandburg
I cannot tell you now;
When the wind's drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind's a whisper at last--
Maybe I'll tell you then--
some other time.
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.
Streets Too Old
© Carl Sandburg
I WALKED among the streets of an old city and the streets were lean as the throats of hard seafish soaked in salt and kept in barrels many years.
How old, how old, how old, we are:the walls went on saying, street walls leaning toward each other like old women of the people, like old midwives tired and only doing what must be done.
The greatest the city could offer me, a stranger, was statues of the kings, on all corners bronzes of kingsancient bearded kings who wrote books and spoke of Gods love for all peopleand young kings who took forth armies out across the frontiers splitting the heads of their opponents and enlarging their kingdoms.
Strangest of all to me, a stranger in this old city, was the murmur always whistling on the winds twisting out of the armpits and fingertips of the kings in bronze:Is there no loosening? Is this for always?
In an early snowflurry one cried:Pull me down where the tired old midwives no longer look at me, throw the bronze of me to a fierce fire and make me into neckchains for dancing children.
Smoke and Steel
© Carl Sandburg
SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Proud and Beautiful
© Carl Sandburg
AFTER you have spent all the money modistes and manicures and mannikins will take for fixing you over into a thing the people on the streets call proud and beautiful,
After the shops and fingers have worn out all they have and know and can hope to have and know for the sake of making you what the people on the streets call proud and beautiful,
After there is absolutely nothing more to be done for the sake of staging you as a great enigmatic bird of paradise and they must all declare you to be proud and beautiful,
After you have become the last word in good looks, insofar as good looks may be fixed and formulated, then, why then, there is nothing more to it then, it is then you listen and see how voices and eyes declare you to be proud and beautiful
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.
Poems Done on a Late Night Car
© Carl Sandburg
Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination
upon the painted faces of women on
North Clark Street, Chicago
Personality
© Carl Sandburg
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
On the Way
© Carl Sandburg
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.
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.
Masses
© Carl Sandburg
AMONG the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
maneuvers, I stood silent;
Mask
© Carl Sandburg
Fling your red scarf faster and faster, dancer.
It is summer and the sun loves a million green leaves,
masses of green.
Your red scarf flashes across them calling and a-calling.
Mascots
© Carl Sandburg
I WILL keep you and bring hands to hold you against a great hunger.
I will run a spear in you for a great gladness to die with.
I will stab you between the ribs of the left side with a great love worth remembering.
Margaret
© Carl Sandburg
Many birds and the beating of wings
Make a flinging reckless hum
In the early morning at the rocks
Above the blue pool
Where the gray shadows swim lazy.
