Love poems
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In The Small Hours
© Wole Soyinka
Departures linger. Absences do not
Deplete the tavern. They hang over the haze
As exhalations from receded shores. Soon,
Night repossesses the silence, but till dawn
The notes hold sway, smoky
Epiphanies, possessive of the hours.
Young Sea
© Carl Sandburg
The sea is never still.
It pounds on the shore
Restless as a young heart,
Hunting.
White Ash
© Carl Sandburg
THERE is a woman on Michigan Boulevard keeps a parrot and goldfish and two white mice.
She used to keep a houseful of girls in kimonos and three pushbuttons on the front door.
Weeds
© Carl Sandburg
FROM the time of the early radishes
To the time of the standing corn
Sleepy Henry Hackerman hoes.
Trinity Place
© Carl Sandburg
THE GRAVE of Alexander Hamilton is in Trinity yard at the end of Wall Street.
The grave of Robert Fulton likewise is in Trinity yard where Wall Street stops.
To Beachey, 1912
© Carl Sandburg
RIDING against the east,
A veering, steady shadow
Purrs the motor-call
Of the man-bird
Throw Roses
© Carl Sandburg
THROW roses on the sea where the dead went down.
The roses speak to the sea,
And the sea to the dead.
Throw roses, O lovers
Let the leaves wash on the salt in the sun.
Threes
© Carl Sandburg
I WAS a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, FraternityI asked
why men die for words.
Three Spring Notations on Bipeds
© Carl Sandburg
1THE DOWN drop of the blackbird,
The wing catch of arrested flight,
The stop midway and then off: off for triangles, circles, loops of new hieroglyphs
This is Aprils way: a woman:
Three Pieces on the Smoke of Autumn
© Carl Sandburg
SMOKE of autumn is on it all.
The streamers loosen and travel.
The red west is stopped with a gray haze.
They fill the ash trees, they wrap the oaks,
They Buy With an Eye to Looks
© Carl Sandburg
THE FINE cloth of your love might be a fabric of Egypt,
Something Sinbad, the sailor, took away from robbers,
Something a traveler with plenty of money might pick up
And bring home and stick on the walls and say:
Theme In Yellow
© Carl Sandburg
I spot the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
The Skyscraper Loves Night
© Carl Sandburg
ONE by one lights of a skyscraper fling their checkering cross work on the velvet gown of night.
I believe the skyscraper loves night as a woman and brings her playthings she asks for, brings her a velvet gown,
And loves the white of her shoulders hidden under the dark feel of it all.
The masonry of steel looks to the night for somebody it loves,
He is a little dizzy and almost dances
waiting
dark
The Sins of Kalamazoo
© Carl Sandburg
THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.
The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.
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 Great Hunt
© Carl Sandburg
I cannot tell you now;
When the wind's drive and whirl
Blow me along no longer,
And the wind's a whisper at last--
Maybe I'll tell you then--
some other time.
Telegram
© Carl Sandburg
I SAW a telegram handed a two hundred pound man at a desk. And the little scrap of paper charged the air like a set of crystals in a chemists tube to a whispering pinch of salt.
Cross my heart, the two hundred pound man had just cracked a joke about a new hat he got his wife, when the messenger boy slipped in and asked him to sign. He gave the boy a nickel, tore the envelope and read.
Then he yelled Good God, jumped for his hat and raincoat, ran for the elevator and took a taxi to a railroad depot.
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.
Streets Too Old
© Carl Sandburg
I WALKED among the streets of an old city and the streets were lean as the throats of hard seafish soaked in salt and kept in barrels many years.
How old, how old, how old, we are:the walls went on saying, street walls leaning toward each other like old women of the people, like old midwives tired and only doing what must be done.
The greatest the city could offer me, a stranger, was statues of the kings, on all corners bronzes of kingsancient bearded kings who wrote books and spoke of Gods love for all peopleand young kings who took forth armies out across the frontiers splitting the heads of their opponents and enlarging their kingdoms.
Strangest of all to me, a stranger in this old city, was the murmur always whistling on the winds twisting out of the armpits and fingertips of the kings in bronze:Is there no loosening? Is this for always?
In an early snowflurry one cried:Pull me down where the tired old midwives no longer look at me, throw the bronze of me to a fierce fire and make me into neckchains for dancing children.
Soiled Dove
© Carl Sandburg
Let us be honest; the lady was not a harlot until she
married a corporation lawyer who picked her from
a Ziegfeld chorus.
Before then she never took anybody's money and paid
