Morning poems
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Matins, Or Morning Prayer
© Robert Herrick
When with the virgin morning thou dost rise,
Crossing thyself come thus to sacrifice;
First wash thy heart in innocence; then bring
Pure hands, pure habits, pure, pure every thing.
To Primroses Filled With Morning Dew
© Robert Herrick
Why do ye weep, sweet babes? can tears
Speak grief in you,
Who were but born
just as the modest morn
To Daffadils
© Robert Herrick
Fair Daffadils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Working Girls
© Carl Sandburg
THE working girls in the morning are going to work--
long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores
and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped
lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.
Two Items
© Carl Sandburg
STRONG rocks hold up the riksdag bridge
always strong river waters shoving their shoulders against them
In the riksdag to-night three hundred men are talking to each other about more potatoes and bread for the Swedish people to eat this winter.
In a boat among calm waters next to the running waters a fisherman sits in the dark and I, leaning at a parapet, see him lift a net and let it down
he waits
the waters run
the riksdag talks
he lifts the net and lets it down
Stars lost in the sky ten days of drizzle spread over the sky saying yes-yes.
Throwbacks
© Carl Sandburg
SOMEWHERE you and I remember we came.
Stairways from the sea and our heads dripping.
Ladders of dust and mud and our hair snarled.
Rags of drenching mist and our hands clawing, climbing.
The Sea Hold
© Carl Sandburg
THE SEA is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land
five white dice rolled from a tube.
The Four Brothers
© Carl Sandburg
MAKE war songs out of these;
Make chants that repeat and weave.
Make rhythms up to the ragtime chatter of the machine guns;
Make slow-booming psalms up to the boom of the big guns.
Tawny
© Carl Sandburg
THESE are the tawny days: your face comes back.
The grapes take on purple: the sunsets redden early on the trellis.
Sixteen Months
© Carl Sandburg
ON the lips of the child Janet float changing dreams.
It is a thin spiral of blue smoke,
A morning campfire at a mountain lake.
Silver Wind
© Carl Sandburg
DO you know how the dream looms? how if summer misses one of us the two of us miss summer
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long breath for the change to low contralto singing mornings when the green corn leaves first break through the black loam
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody of the moon songs in the light nights when the earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains lighter than a goose down
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the laughter of slats of silver under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind motions of the hickory shingle leaves, in the imitations of slow sea water on the shingle silver in the wind
I shall look for you.
Savoir Faire
© Carl Sandburg
CAST a bronze of my head and legs and put them on the kings street.
Set the cast of me here alongside Carl XII, making two Carls for the Swedish people and the utlanders to look at between the palace and the Grand Hotel.
The summer sun will shine on both the Carls, and November drizzles wrap the two, one in tall leather boots, one in wool leggins.
Also I place it in the record: the Swedish people may name boats after me or change the name of a long street and give it one of my nicknames.
Sandpipers
© Carl Sandburg
Sandland where the salt water kills the sweet potatoes.
Homes for sandpipersthe script of their feet is on the sea shinglesthey write in the morning, it is gone at noonthey write at noon, it is gone at night.
Pity the land, the sea, the ten mile flats, pity anything but the sandpipers wire legs and feet.
Rusty Crimson
© Carl Sandburg
(Chirstmas Day, 1917)THE FIVE OCLOCK prairie sunset is a strong man going to sleep after a long day in a cornfield.
The red dust of a rusty crimson is fixed with two fingers of lavender. A hook of smoke, a womans nose in charcoal and
nothing.
Repetitions
© Carl Sandburg
THEY are crying salt tears
Over the beautiful beloved body
Of Inez Milholland,
Because they are glad she lived,
Prairie
© Carl Sandburg
I WAS born on the prairie and the milk of its wheat, the red of its clover, the eyes of its women, gave me a song and a slogan.
Here the water went down, the icebergs slid with gravel, the gaps and the valleys hissed, and the black loam came, and the yellow sandy loam.
Here between the sheds of the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, here now a morning star fixes a fire sign over the timber claims and cow pastures, the corn belt, the cotton belt, the cattle ranches.
Potomac River Mist
© Carl Sandburg
ALL the policemen, saloonkeepers and efficiency experts in Toledo knew Bern Dailey; secretary ten years when Whitlock was mayor.
Pickpockets, yeggs, three card men, he knew them all and how they flit from zone to zone, birds of wind and weather, singers, fighters, scavengers.
The Washington monument pointed to a new moon for us and a gang from over the river sang ragtime to a ukelele.
Potato Blossom Songs and Jigs
© Carl Sandburg
RUM tiddy um,
tiddy um,
tiddy um tum tum.
My knees are loose-like, my feet want to sling their selves.
Pennsylvania
© Carl Sandburg
I HAVE been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and the Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
Paula
© Carl Sandburg
NOTHING else in this songonly your face.
Nothing else hereonly your drinking, night-gray eyes.
The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel.
