Money poems
/ page 59 of 64 /
Money Makes The Mirth
© Robert Herrick
When all birds else do of their music fail,
Money's the still-sweet-singing nightingale!
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.
To a Contemporary Bunkshooter
© Carl Sandburg
You come along squirting words at us, shaking your fist
and calling us all damn fools so fierce the froth slobbers
over your lips. . . always blabbing we're all
going to hell straight off and you know all about it.
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:
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.
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
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
Mohammed Bek Hadjetlache
© Carl Sandburg
THIS Mohammedan colonel from the Caucasus yells with his voice and wigwags with his arms.
The interpreter translates, I was a friend of Kornilov, he asks me what to do and I tell him.
A stub of a man, this Mohammedan colonel
a projectile shape
a bald head hammered
Does he fight or do they put him in a cannon and shoot him at the enemy?
Half Moon in a High Wind
© Carl Sandburg
MONEY is nothing now, even if I had it,
O mooney moon, yellow half moon,
Up over the green pines and gray elms,
Up in the new blue.
Government
© Carl Sandburg
Everywhere I saw that Government is a thing made of
men, that Government has blood and bones, it is
many mouths whispering into many ears, sending
telegrams, aiming rifles, writing orders, saying
"yes" and "no."
Fellow Citizens
© Carl Sandburg
I DRANK musty ale at the Illinois Athletic Club with
the millionaire manufacturer of Green River butter
one night
And his face had the shining light of an old-time Quaker,
Do You Want Affidavits?
© Carl Sandburg
THERES a hole in the bottom of the sea.
Do you want affidavits?
Theres a man in the moon with money for you.
Do you want affidavits?
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.
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
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.
Balloon Faces
© Carl Sandburg
THE BALLOONS hang on wires in the Marigold Gardens.
They spot their yellow and gold, they juggle their blue and red, they float their faces on the face of the sky.
Balloon face eaters sit by hundreds reading the eat cards, asking, What shall we eat?and the waiters, Have you ordered? they are sixty ballon faces sifting white over the tuxedoes.
Poets, lawyers, ad men, mason contractors, smartalecks discussing educated jackasses, here they put crabs into their balloon faces.
A Coin
© Carl Sandburg
YOUR western heads here cast on money,
You are the two that fade away together,
Partners in the mist.
Boes
© Carl Sandburg
I WAITED today for a freight train to pass.
Cattle cars with steers butting their horns against the
bars, went by.
And a half a dozen hoboes stood on bumpers between
Wind Song
© Carl Sandburg
LONG ago I learned how to sleep,
In an old apple orchard where the wind swept by counting its money and throwing it away,
In a wind-gaunt orchard where the limbs forked out and listened or never listened at all,
In a passel of trees where the branches trapped the wind into whistling, Who, who are you?
Under A Telephone Pole
© Carl Sandburg
I AM a copper wire slung in the air,
Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.
Night and day I keep singing--humming and thrumming:
It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the
