Hope poems
/ page 409 of 439 /
Tangibles
© Carl Sandburg
(Washington, August, 1918)I HAVE seen this city in the day and the sun.
I have seen this city in the night and the moon.
And in the night and the moon I have seen a thing this city gave me nothing of in the day and the sun.
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.
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
Hats
© Carl Sandburg
HATS, where do you belong?
what is under you?
On the rim of a skyscrapers forehead
Eleventh Avenue Racket
© Carl Sandburg
THERE is something terrible
about a hurdy-gurdy,
a gipsy man and woman,
and a monkey in red flannel
Curse of a Rich Polish Peasant on His Sister Who Ran Away With a Wild Man
© Carl Sandburg
FELIKSOWA has gone again from our house and this time for good, I hope.
She and her husband took with them the cow father gave them, and they sold it.
She went like a swine, because she called neither on me, her brother, nor on her father, before leaving for those forests.
That is where she ought to live, with bears, not with men.
Crapshooters
© Carl Sandburg
SOMEBODY loses whenever somebody wins.
This was known to the Chaldeans long ago.
And more: somebody wins whenever somebody loses.
This too was in the savvy of the Chaldeans.
Clocks
© Carl Sandburg
HERE is a face that says half-past seven the same way whether a murder or a wedding goes on, whether a funeral or a picnic crowd passes.
A tall one I know at the end of a hallway broods in shadows and is watching booze eat out the insides of the man of the house; it has seen five hopes go in five years: one woman, one child, and three dreams.
A little one carried in a leather box by an actress rides with her to hotels and is under her pillow in a sleeping-car between one-night stands.
One hoists a phiz over a railroad station; it points numbers to people a quarter-mile away who believe it when other clocks fail.
And of course
there are wrist watches over the pulses of airmen eager to go to France
Caboose Thoughts
© Carl Sandburg
ITS going to come out all rightdo you know?
The sun, the birds, the grassthey know.
They get alongand well get along.
Work Gangs
© Carl Sandburg
BOX cars run by a mile long.
And I wonder what they say to each other
When they stop a mile long on a sidetrack.
Maybe their chatter goes:
Wilderness
© Carl Sandburg
THERE is a wolf in me
fangs pointed for tearing gashes
a red tongue for raw meat
and the hot lapping of bloodI keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.
There is a fox in me
a silver-gray fox
I sniff and guess
I pick things out of the wind and air
I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers
I circle and loop and double-cross.
Mill-Doors
© Carl Sandburg
YOU never come back.
I say good-by when I see you going in the doors,
The hopeless open doors that call and wait
And take you then for--how many cents a day?
How many cents for the sleepy eyes and fingers?
Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio
© Carl Sandburg
ITS a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes
The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.
The banjo tickles and titters too awful.
The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.
Dream Girl
© Carl Sandburg
YOU will come one day in a waver of love,
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.
An Autumn Sunset
© Edith Wharton
ILeaguered in fire
The wild black promontories of the coast extend
Their savage silhouettes;
The sun in universal carnage sets,
Remorse For Any Death
© Jorge Luis Borges
Free of memory and of hope,
limitless, abstract, almost future,
the dead man is not a dead man: he is death.
Like the God of the mystics,
That One
© Jorge Luis Borges
Oh days devoted to the useless burden
of putting out of mind the biography
of a minor poet of the Southem Hemisphere,
to whom the fates or perhaps the stars have given
