Life poems
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Jaws
© Carl Sandburg
SEVEN nations stood with their hands on the jaws of death.
It was the first week in August, Nineteen Hundred Fourteen.
I was listening, you were listening, the whole world was
listening,
It Is Much
© Carl Sandburg
Women of night life amid the lights
Where the line of your full, round throats
Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes
And the ring of your heart-deep laughter:
It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
In a Breath
© Carl Sandburg
HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue
asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors.
Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching
play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.
Illinois Farmer
© Carl Sandburg
BURY this old Illinois farmer with respect.
He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields.
Now he goes on a long sleep.
The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib,
The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn.
Horse Fiddle
© Carl Sandburg
FIRST I would like to write for you a poem to be shouted in the teeth of a strong wind.
Next I would like to write one for you to sit on a hill and read down the river valley on a late summer afternoon, reading it in less than a whisper to Jack on his soft wire legs learning to stand up and preach, Jack-in-the-pulpit.
As many poems as I have written to the moon and the streaming of the moon spinners of light, so many of the summer moon and the winter moon I would like to shoot along to your ears for nothing, for a laugh, a song,
for nothing at all,
Glimmer
© Carl Sandburg
LET down your braids of hair, lady.
Cross your legs and sit before the looking-glass
And gaze long on lines under your eyes.
Life writes; men dance.
And you know how men pay women.
Fire Dreams
© Carl Sandburg
I REMEMBER here by the fire,
In the flickering reds and saffrons,
They came in a ramshackle tub,
Pilgrims in tall hats,
Dynamiter
© Carl Sandburg
I SAT with a dynamiter at supper in a German saloon
eating steak and onions.
And he laughed and told stories of his wife and children
and the cause of labor and the working class.
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.
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
Broadway
© Carl Sandburg
Hearts that know you hate you
And lips that have given you laughter
Have gone to their ashes of life and its roses,
Cursing the dreams that were lost
In the dust of your harsh and trampled stones.
Boy and Father
© Carl Sandburg
THE BOY Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.
The leather law books of Alexanders father fill a room like hay in a barn.
Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books.
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.
And They Obey
© Carl Sandburg
SMASH down the cities.
Knock the walls to pieces.
Break the factories and cathedrals, warehouses
and homes
Still Life
© Carl Sandburg
COOL your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.
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
Onion Days
© Carl Sandburg
MRS. GABRIELLE GIOVANNITTI comes along Peoria Street
every morning at nine o'clock
With kindling wood piled on top of her head, her eyes
looking straight ahead to find the way for her old feet.
Bath
© Carl Sandburg
A MAN saw the whole world as a grinning skull and
cross-bones. The rose flesh of life shriveled from all
faces. Nothing counts. Everything is a fake. Dust to
dust and ashes to ashes and then an old darkness and a
Aztec Mask
© Carl Sandburg
I wanted a man's face looking into the jaws and throat
of life
With something proud on his face, so proud no smash
of the jaws,
A Fence
© Carl Sandburg
NOW the stone house on the lake front is finished and the
workmen are beginning the fence.
The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that
can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.
