Morning poems
/ page 285 of 310 /
Branches
© Carl Sandburg
The long beautiful night of the wind and rain in April,
The long night hanging down from the drooping branches of the top of a birch tree,
Swinging, swaying, to the wind for a partner, to the rain for a partner.
What is the humming, swishing thing they sing in the morning now?
The rain, the wind, the swishing whispers of the long slim curve so little and so dark on the western morning sky
these dancing girls here on an April early morning
They have had a long cool beautiful night of it with their partners learning this years song of April.
Baltic Fog Notes
© Carl Sandburg
(Bergen)SEVEN days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rats neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
Fog and fog and no stars, sun, moon.
Then an afternoon in fjords, low-lying lands scrawled in granite languages on a gray sky,
Among the Red Guns
© Carl Sandburg
AMONG the red guns,
In the hearts of soldiers
Running free blood
In the long, long campaign:
Dreams go on.
To a Dead Man
© Carl Sandburg
Over the dead line we have called to you
To come across with a word to us,
Some beaten whisper of what happens
Where you are over the dead line
Deaf to our calls and voiceless.
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.
Kreisler
© Carl Sandburg
SELL me a violin, mister, of old mysterious wood.
Sell me a fiddle that has kissed dark nights on the forehead where men kiss sisters they love.
Sell me dried wood that has ached with passion clutching the knees and arms of a storm.
Sell me horsehair and rosin that has sucked at the breasts of the morning sun for milk.
Sell me something crushed in the heartsblood of pain readier than ever for one more song.
Halsted Street Car
© Carl Sandburg
COME you, cartoonists,
Hang on a strap with me here
At seven o'clock in the morning
On a Halsted street car.
Blue Ridge
© Carl Sandburg
BORN a million years ago you stay here a million years
watching the women come and live and be laid away
you and they thin-gray thin-dusk lovely.
So it goes: either the early morning lights are lovely or the early morning star.
I am glad I have seen racehorses, women, mountains.
The Road and the End
© Carl Sandburg
I SHALL foot it
Down the roadway in the dusk,
Where shapes of hunger wander
And the fugitives of pain go by.
The Book of Hours of Sister Clotilde
© Amy Lowell
The Bell in the convent tower swung.
High overhead the great sun hung,
A navel for the curving sky.
The air was a blue clarity.
Pickthorn Manor
© Amy Lowell
I
How fresh the Dartle's little waves that day! A
steely silver, underlined with blue,
And flashing where the round clouds, blown away, Let drop the
The Last Quarter of the Moon
© Amy Lowell
How long shall I tarnish the mirror of life,
A spatter of rust on its polished steel!
The seasons reel
Like a goaded wheel.
Clear, with Light, Variable Winds
© Amy Lowell
The fountain bent and straightened itself
In the night wind,
Blowing like a flower.
It gleamed and glittered,
The Red Lacquer Music-Stand
© Amy Lowell
The clock upon the stair
Struck five, and in the kitchen someone shook a grate.
The Boy began to dress, for it was getting late.
On Carpaccio's Picture: The Dream of St. Ursula
© Amy Lowell
Swept, clean, and still, across the polished floor
From some unshuttered casement, hid from sight,
The level sunshine slants, its greater light
Quenching the little lamp which pallid, poor,
The Basket
© Amy Lowell
Peter watches her, fluid with fatigue, floating, and drifting,
and undulant in the orange glow. His senses flow towards
her,
where she lies supine and dreaming. Seeming drowned in
a golden halo.
The pungent smell of the geraniums is hard to bear.
The Great Adventure of Max Breuck
© Amy Lowell
1
A yellow band of light upon the street
Pours from an open door, and makes a wide
Pathway of bright gold across a sheet
The Road to Avignon
© Amy Lowell
A Minstrel stands on a marble stair,
Blown by the bright wind, debonair;
Below lies the sea, a sapphire floor,
Above on the terrace a turret door
Suggested by the Cover of a Volume of Keats's Poems
© Amy Lowell
Wild little bird, who chose thee for a sign
To put upon the cover of this book?
Who heard thee singing in the distance dim,
The vague, far greenness of the enshrouding wood,
