Work poems

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Laid out for dead, let thy last kindness be
With leaves and moss-work for to cover me;
And while the wood-nymphs my cold corpse inter,
Sing thou my dirge, sweet-warbling chorister!
For epitaph, in foliage, next write this:
HERE, HERE THE TOMB OF ROBIN HERRICK IS!

California Plush

© Frank Bidart

is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing

Herbert White

© Frank Bidart

and then I did it to her a couple of times,--
but it was funny,--afterwards,
it was as if somebody else did it ...

Civilian and Soldier

© Wole Soyinka

My apparition rose from the fall of lead,
Declared, 'I am a civilian.' It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.

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.

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 Certain Journeymen

© Carl Sandburg

You handle dust going to a long country,
You know the secret behind your job is the same whether
you lower the coffin with modern, automatic machinery,
well-oiled and noiseless, or whether the
body is laid in by naked hands and then covered
by the shovels.

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.

Threes

© Carl Sandburg

I WAS a boy when I heard three red words
a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets
for: Liberty, Equality, FraternityI asked
why men die for words.

Three Ghosts

© Carl Sandburg

THREE tailors of Tooley Street wrote: We, the People.
The names are forgotten. It is a joke in ghosts.

Cutters or bushelmen or armhole basters, they sat

They Will Say

© Carl Sandburg

OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:
You took little children away from the sun and the dew,
And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,
And the reckless rain; you put them between walls

The Skyscraper Loves Night

© Carl Sandburg

ONE by one lights of a skyscraper fling their checkering cross work on the velvet gown of night.
I believe the skyscraper loves night as a woman and brings her playthings she asks for, brings her a velvet gown,
And loves the white of her shoulders hidden under the dark feel of it all.

The masonry of steel looks to the night for somebody it loves,
He is a little dizzy and almost dances waiting dark

The Sins of Kalamazoo

© Carl Sandburg

THE SINS of Kalamazoo are neither scarlet nor crimson.

The sins of Kalamazoo are a convict gray, a dishwater drab.

The Right to Grief

© Carl Sandburg

TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow,
Over the dead child of a millionaire,
And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank
Which the millionaire might order his secretary to
scratch off
And get cashed.

The Mayor of Gary

I ASKED the Mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.
And the Mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in the United States.
Go into the plants and you will see men sitting around doing nothingmachinery does everything, said the Mayor of Gary when I asked him about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.
And he wore cool cream pants, the Mayor of Gary, and white shoes, and a barber had fixed him up with a shampoo and a shave and he was easy and imperturbable though the government weather bureau thermometer said 96 and children were soaking their heads at bubbling fountains on the street corners.

The Hangman at Home

WHAT does the hangman think about
When he goes home at night from work?
When he sits down with his wife and
Children for a cup of coffee and a

The Answer

You have spoken the answer.
A child searches far sometimes
Into the red dust
On a dark rose leaf

I SAW a telegram handed a two hundred pound man at a desk. And the little scrap of paper charged the air like a set of crystals in a chemists tube to a whispering pinch of salt.
Cross my heart, the two hundred pound man had just cracked a joke about a new hat he got his wife, when the messenger boy slipped in and asked him to sign. He gave the boy a nickel, tore the envelope and read.
Then he yelled Good God, jumped for his hat and raincoat, ran for the elevator and took a taxi to a railroad depot.

Stripes

POLICEMAN in front of a bank 3 A.M. lonely.
Policeman State and Madison high noon mobs cars parcels lonely.

Woman in suburbs keeping night watch on a sleeping typhoid patient only a clock to talk to lonesome.
Woman selling gloves bargain day department store furious crazy-work of many hands slipping in and out of gloves lonesome.

Smoke and Steel

SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,