Women poems
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Poems Done on a Late Night Car
© Carl Sandburg
Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination
upon the painted faces of women on
North Clark Street, Chicago
Personality
© Carl Sandburg
Musings of a Police Reporter in the Identification BureauYOU have loved forty women, but you have only one thumb.
You have led a hundred secret lives, but you mark only
one thumb.
You go round the world and fight in a thousand wars and
North Atlantic
© Carl Sandburg
WHEN the sea is everywhere
from horizon to horizon ..
when the salt and blue
fill a circle of horizons ..
Near Keokuk
© Carl Sandburg
THIRTY-TWO Greeks are dipping their feet in a creek.
Sloshing their bare feet in a cool flow of clear water.
All one midsummer day ten hours the Greeks
stand in leather shoes shoveling gravel.
Momus
© Carl Sandburg
Momus is the name men give your face,
The brag of its tone, like a long low steamboat whistle
Finding a way mid mist on a shoreland,
Where gray rocks let the salt water shatter spray
Against horizons purple, silent.
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?
Limited
© Carl Sandburg
I AM riding on a limited express, one of the crack trains
of the nation.
Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark air
go fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.
Killers
© Carl Sandburg
I AM singing to you
Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;
Hard as a man in handcuffs,
Held where he cannot move:
Jack
© Carl Sandburg
JACK was a swarthy, swaggering son-of-a-gun.
He worked thirty years on the railroad, ten hours a day,
and his hands were tougher than sole leather.
He married a tough woman and they had eight children
It Is Much
© Carl Sandburg
Women of night life amid the lights
Where the line of your full, round throats
Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes
And the ring of your heart-deep laughter:
It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
In a Breath
© Carl Sandburg
HIGH noon. White sun flashes on the Michigan Avenue
asphalt. Drum of hoofs and whirr of motors.
Women trapsing along in flimsy clothes catching
play of sun-fire to their skin and eyes.
Hoodlums
© Carl Sandburg
I AM a hoodlum, you are a hoodlum, we and all of us are a world of hoodlumsmaybe so.
I hate and kill better men than I am, so do you, so do all of usmaybemaybe so.
In the ends of my fingers the itch for another mans neck, I want to see him hanging, one of dusks cartoons against the sunset.
This is the hate my father gave me, this was in my mothers milk, this is you and me and all of us in a world of hoodlumsmaybe so.
Graceland
© Carl Sandburg
TOMB of a millionaire,
A multi-millionaire, ladies and gentlemen,
Place of the dead where they spend every year
The usury of twenty-five thousand dollars
Glimmer
© Carl Sandburg
LET down your braids of hair, lady.
Cross your legs and sit before the looking-glass
And gaze long on lines under your eyes.
Life writes; men dance.
And you know how men pay women.
Falltime
© Carl Sandburg
GOLD of a ripe oat straw, gold of a southwest moon,
Canada thistle blue and flimmering larkspur blue,
Tomatoes shining in the October sun with red hearts,
Shining five and six in a row on a wooden fence,
Dunes
© Carl Sandburg
WHAT do we see here in the sand dunes of the white
moon alone with our thoughts, Bill,
Alone with our dreams, Bill, soft as the women tying
scarves around their heads dancing,
Cumulatives
© Carl Sandburg
STORMS have beaten on this point of land
And ships gone to wreck here
and the passers-by remember it
with talk on the deck at night
as they near it.
Chamfort
© Carl Sandburg
THERE'S Chamfort. He's a sample.
Locked himself in his library with a gun,
Shot off his nose and shot out his right eye.
And this Chamfort knew how to write
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
