Great poems
/ page 507 of 549 /
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.
John Ericsson Day Memorial, 1918
© Carl Sandburg
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.
Interior
© Carl Sandburg
IN the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
In a Back Alley
© Carl Sandburg
REMEMBRANCE for a great man is this.
The newsies are pitching pennies.
And on the copper disk is the man's face.
Dead lover of boys, what do you ask for now?
Hoodlums
© Carl Sandburg
I AM a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum, we and all of us are a world of hoodlumsmaybe so.
I hate and kill better men than I am, so do you, so do all of usmaybemaybe so.
In the ends of my fingers the itch for another mans neck, I want to see him hanging, one of dusks cartoons against the sunset.
This is the hate my father gave me, this was in my mothers milk, this is you and me and all of us in a world of hoodlumsmaybe so.
Haze
© Carl Sandburg
KEEP a red heart of memories
Under the great gray rain sheds of the sky,
Under the open sun and the yellow gloaming embers.
Remember all paydays of lilacs and songbirds;
Graves
© Carl Sandburg
I dreamed one man stood against a thousand,
One man damned as a wrongheaded fool.
One year and another he walked the streets,
And a thousand shrugs and hoots
Met him in the shoulders and mouths he passed.
Drumnotes
© Carl Sandburg
DAYS of the dead men, Danny.
Drum for the dead, drum on your
remembering heart.
Do You Want Affidavits?
© Carl Sandburg
THERES a hole in the bottom of the sea.
Do you want affidavits?
Theres a man in the moon with money for you.
Do you want affidavits?
Crimson
© Carl Sandburg
CRIMSON is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dead and while he lies in his
coffin a gone flame I sit here in cumbering shadows
and smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)
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.
Cartoon
© Carl Sandburg
I AM making a Cartoon of a Woman. She is the People.
She is the Great Dirty Mother.
And Many Children hang on her Apron, crawl at her
Feet, snuggle at her Breasts.
Carlovingian Dreams
© Carl Sandburg
COUNT these reminiscences like money.
The Greeks had their picnics under another name.
The Romans wore glad rags and told their neighbors, What of it?
The Carlovingians hauling logs on carts, they too
Broken Tabernacles
© Carl Sandburg
HAVE I broken the smaller tabernacles, O Lord?
And in the destruction of these set up the greater and massive, the everlasting tabernacles?
I know nothing today, what I have done and why, O Lord, only I have broken and broken tabernacles.
They were beautiful in a way, these tabernacles torn down by strong hands swearing
They were beautifulwhy did the hypocrites carve their own names on the corner-stones? why did the hypocrites keep on singing their own names in their long noses every Sunday in these tabernacles?
Who lays any blame here among the split cornerstones?
Adelaide Crapsey
© Carl Sandburg
AMONG the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,
I read your heart in a book.
And your mouth of blue pansyI know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.
A Million Young Workmen, 1915
© Carl Sandburg
A MILLION young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads,
And the million are now under soil and their rottening flesh will in the years feed roots of blood-red roses.
Yes, this million of young workmen slaughtered one another and never saw their red hands.
And oh, it would have been a great job of killing and a new and beautiful thing under the sun if the million knew why they hacked and tore each other to death.
Salvage
© Carl Sandburg
GUNS on the battle lines have pounded now a year
between Brussels and Paris.
And, William Morris, when I read your old chapter on
the great arches and naves and little whimsical
Prayers of Steel
© Carl Sandburg
LAY me on an anvil, O God.
Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.
Let me pry loose old walls.
Let me lift and loosen old foundations.
From The Shore
© Carl Sandburg
A LONE gray bird,
Dim-dipping, far-flying,
Alone in the shadows and grandeurs and tumults
Of night and the sea
And the stars and storms.
