Time poems
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Never Born
© Carl Sandburg
THE TIME has gone by.
The child is dead.
The child was never even born.
Why go on? Why so much as begin?
Mist Forms
© Carl Sandburg
THE SHEETS of night mist travel a long valley.
I know why you came at sundown in a scarf mist.
What was it we touched asking nothing and asking all?
Losers
© Carl Sandburg
IF I should pass the tomb of Jonah
I would stop there and sit for awhile;
Because I was swallowed one time deep in the dark
And came out alive after all.
Let Love Go On
© Carl Sandburg
LET it go on; let the love of this hour be poured out till all the answers are made, the last dollar spent and the last blood gone.
Time runs with an ax and a hammer, time slides down the hallways with a pass-key and a master-key, and time gets by, time wins.
Jabberers
© Carl Sandburg
I RISE out of my depths with my language.
You rise out of your depths with your language.
Two tongues from the depths,
Interior
© Carl Sandburg
IN the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
Flanders
© Carl Sandburg
FLANDERS, the name of a place, a country of people,
Spells itself with letters, is written in books.
Where is Flanders? was asked one time,
Fire-Logs
© Carl Sandburg
NANCY HANKS dreams by the fire;
Dreams, and the logs sputter,
And the yellow tongues climb.
Red lines lick their way in flickers.
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,
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.
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.
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.
Blue Maroons
© Carl Sandburg
YOU slut, he flung at her.
It was more than a hundred times
He had thrown it into her face
And by this time it meant nothing to her.
Blue Island Intersection
© Carl Sandburg
SIX street ends come together here.
They feed people and wagons into the center.
In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags,
Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby buggies.
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.
Baby Vamps
© Carl Sandburg
BABY vamps, is it harder work than it used to be?
Are the new soda parlors worse than the old time saloons?
Baby vamps, do you have jobs in the day time or is this all you do? do you come out only at night?
In the winter at the skating rinks, in the summer at the roller coaster parks,
Aprons of Silence
© Carl Sandburg
MANY things I might have said today.
And I kept my mouth shut.
So many times I was asked
To come and say the same things
Alix
© Carl Sandburg
THE MARE Alix breaks the worlds trotting record one day. I see her heels flash down the dust of an Illinois race track on a summer afternoon. I see the timekeepers put their heads together over stopwatches, and call to the grand stand a split second is clipped off the old worlds record and a new worlds record fixed.
I see the mare Alix led away by men in undershirts and streaked faces. Dripping Alix in foam of white on the harness and shafts. And the men in undershirts kiss her ears and rub her nose, and tie blankets on her, and take her away to have the sweat sponged.
White Hands
© Carl Sandburg
FOR the second time in a year this lady with the white hands is brought to the west room second floor of a famous sanatorium.
Her husband is a cornice manufacturer in an Iowa town and the lady has often read papers on Victorian poets before the local literary club.
Yesterday she washed her hands forty seven times during her waking hours and in her sleep moaned restlessly attempting to clean imaginary soiled spots off her hands.
Now the head physician touches his chin with a crooked forefinger.
Sunset From Omaha Hotel Window
© Carl Sandburg
INTO the blue river hills
The red sun runners go
And the long sand changes
And to-day is a goner
