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Knucks
© Carl Sandburg
IN Abraham Lincolns city,
Where they remember his lawyers shingle,
The place where they brought him
Wrapped in battle flags,
Killers
© Carl Sandburg
I AM singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:
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.
In Tall Grass
© Carl Sandburg
BEES and a honeycomb in the dried head of a horse in a pasture cornera skull in the tall grass and a buzz and a buzz of the yellow honey-hunters.
And I ask no better a winding sheet
(over the earth and under the sun.)
Graceland
© Carl Sandburg
TOMB of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
Flanders
© Carl Sandburg
FLANDERS, the name of a place, a country of people,
Spells itself with letters, is written in books.
Where is Flanders? was asked one time,
Eleventh Avenue Racket
© Carl Sandburg
THERE is something terrible
about a hurdy-gurdy,
a gipsy man and woman,
and a monkey in red flannel
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,
Calls
© Carl Sandburg
BECAUSE I have called to you
as the flame flamingo calls,
or the want of a spotted hawk
is called
Broken-face Gargoyles
© Carl Sandburg
ALL I can give you is broken-face gargoyles.
It is too early to sing and dance at funerals,
Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker humming a lullaby and throwing his feet in a swift and mystic buck-and-wing, now you see it and now you dont.
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.
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.
Aztec
© Carl Sandburg
You came from the Aztecs
With a copper on your fore-arms
Tawnier than a sunset
Saying good-by to an even river.
Anna Imroth
© Carl Sandburg
CROSS the hands over the breast here--so.
Straighten the legs a little more--so.
And call for the wagon to come and take her home.
Her mother will cry some and so will her sisters and
And They Obey
© Carl Sandburg
SMASH down the cities.
Knock the walls to pieces.
Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses
and homes
Picnic Boat
© Carl Sandburg
SUNDAY night and the park policemen tell each other it
is dark as a stack of black cats on Lake Michigan.
A big picnic boat comes home to Chicago from the peach
farms of Saugatuck.
Nights Nothings Again
© Carl Sandburg
WHO knows what I know
when I have asked the night questions
and the night has answered nothing
only the old answers?
Home Thoughts
© Carl Sandburg
THE SEA rocks have a green moss.
The pine rocks have red berries.
I have memories of you.
Home Fires
© Carl Sandburg
IN a Yiddish eating place on Rivington Street
faces
coffee spots
children kicking at the night stars with bare toes from bare buttocks.
They know it is September on Rivington when the red tomaytoes cram the pushcarts,
Here the children snozzle at milk bottles, children who have never seen a cow.
Here the stranger wonders how so many people remember where they keep home fires.
History Of The Night
© Jorge Luis Borges
Throughout the course of the generations
men constructed the night.
At first she was blindness;
thorns raking bare feet,
