Home poems
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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 Hangman at Home
© Carl Sandburg
WHAT does the hangman think about
When he goes home at night from work?
When he sits down with his wife and
Children for a cup of coffee and a
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.
Sumach and Birds
© Carl Sandburg
IF you never came with a pigeon rainbow purple
Shining in the six oclock September dusk:
If the red sumach on the autumn roads
Never danced on the flame of your eyelashes:
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,
Sandpipers
© Carl Sandburg
Sandland where the salt water kills the sweet potatoes.
Homes for sandpipersthe script of their feet is on the sea shinglesthey write in the morning, it is gone at noonthey write at noon, it is gone at night.
Pity the land, the sea, the ten mile flats, pity anything but the sandpipers wire legs and feet.
River Moons
© Carl Sandburg
THE DOUBLE moon, one on the high back drop of the west, one on the curve of the river face,
The sky moon of fire and the river moon of water, I am taking these home in a basket, hung on an elbow, such a teeny weeny elbow, in my head.
I saw them last night, a cradle moon, two horns of a moon, such an early hopeful moon, such a childs moon for all young hearts to make a picture of.
The riverI remember this like a picturethe river was the upper twist of a written question mark.
I know now it takes many many years to write a river, a twist of water asking a question.
And white stars moved when the moon moved, and one red star kept burning, and the Big Dipper was almost overhead.
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.
Potomac River Mist
© Carl Sandburg
ALL the policemen, saloonkeepers and efficiency experts in Toledo knew Bern Dailey; secretary ten years when Whitlock was mayor.
Pickpockets, yeggs, three card men, he knew them all and how they flit from zone to zone, birds of wind and weather, singers, fighters, scavengers.
The Washington monument pointed to a new moon for us and a gang from over the river sang ragtime to a ukelele.
Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs
© Carl Sandburg
RUM tiddy um,
tiddy um,
tiddy um tum tum.
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.
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
Pennsylvania
© Carl Sandburg
I HAVE been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and the Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
Old Woman
© Carl Sandburg
THE owl-car clatters along, dogged by the echo
From building and battered paving-stone.
The headlight scoffs at the mist,
And fixes its yellow rays in the cold slow rain;
Against a pane I press my forehead
And drowsily look on the walls and sidewalks.
Murmurings in a field hospital
© Carl Sandburg
COME to me only with playthings now. . .
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .
Memoir of a Proud Boy
© Carl Sandburg
HE lived on the wings of storm.
The ashes are in Chihuahua.
Out of Ludlow and coal towns in Colorado
Medallion
© Carl Sandburg
THE BRASS medallion profile of your face I keep always.
It is not jingling with loose change in my pockets.
It is not stuck up in a show place on the office wall.
I carry it in a special secret pocket in the day
Manitoba Childe Roland
© Carl Sandburg
LAST night a January wind was ripping at the shingles over our house and whistling a wolf
song under the eaves.
I sat in a leather rocker and read to a six-year-old girl the Browning poem, Childe
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,
