Work poems
/ page 326 of 355 /
Sleepyheads
© Carl Sandburg
SLEEP is a maker of makers. Birds sleep. Feet cling to a perch. Look at the balance. Let the legs loosen, the backbone untwist, the head go heavy over, the whole works tumbles a done bird off the perch.
Fox cubs sleep. The pointed head curls round into hind legs and tail. It is a ball of red hair. It is a muff waiting. A wind might whisk it in the air across pastures and rivers, a cocoon, a pod of seeds. The snooze of the black nose is in a circle of red hair.
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.
Population Drifts
© Carl Sandburg
NEW-MOWN hay smell and wind of the plain made her
a woman whose ribs had the power of the hills in
them and her hands were tough for work and there
was passion for life in her womb.
People Who Must
© Carl Sandburg
I PAINTED on the roof of a skyscraper.
I painted a long while and called it a days work.
The people on a corner swarmed and the traffic cops whistle never let up all afternoon.
They were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way
Pennsylvania
© Carl Sandburg
I HAVE been in Pennsylvania,
In the Monongahela and the Hocking Valleys.
In the blue Susquehanna
Ossawatomie
© Carl Sandburg
I DONT know how he came,
shambling, dark, and strong.
He stood in the city and told men:
Omaha
© Carl Sandburg
RED barns and red heifers spot the green
grass circles around Omahathe farmers
haul tanks of cream and wagon loads of cheese.
Old Timers
© Carl Sandburg
I AM an ancient reluctant conscript.
On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.
North Atlantic
© Carl Sandburg
WHEN the sea is everywhere
from horizon to horizon ..
when the salt and blue
fill a circle of horizons ..
Muckers
© Carl Sandburg
Of the twenty looking on
Ten murmer, "O, its a hell of a job,"
Ten others, "Jesus, I wish I had the job."
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?
Masses
© Carl Sandburg
AMONG the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and
red crag and was amazed;
On the beach where the long push under the endless tide
maneuvers, I stood silent;
Loin Cloth
© Carl Sandburg
BODY of Jesus taken down from the cross
Carved in ivory by a lover of Christ,
It is a childs handful you are here,
The breadth of a mans finger,
Laughing Corn
© Carl Sandburg
THERE was a high majestic fooling
Day before yesterday in the yellow corn.
And day after to-morrow in the yellow corn
Joliet
© Carl Sandburg
ON the one hand the steel works.
On the other hand the penitentiary.
Sante Fé trains and Alton trains
Between smokestacks on the west
John Ericsson Day Memorial, 1918
© Carl Sandburg
INTO the gulf and the pit of the dark night, the cold night, there is a man goes into the dark and the cold and when he comes back to his people he brings fire in his hands and they remember him in the years afterward as the fire bringerthey remember or forgetthe man whose head kept singing to the want of his home, the want of his people.
For this man there is no name thought ofhe has broken from jungles and the old oxen and the old wagonscircled the earth with shipsbelted the earth with steelswung with wings and a drumming motor in the high blue skyshot his words on a wireless way through shattering sea storms:out from the night and out from the jungles his head keeps singingthere is no road for him but on and on.
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
Interior
© Carl Sandburg
IN the cool of the night time
The clocks pick off the points
And the mainsprings loosen.
They will need winding.
Illinois Farmer
© Carl Sandburg
BURY this old Illinois farmer with respect.
He slept the Illinois nights of his life after days of work in Illinois cornfields.
Now he goes on a long sleep.
The wind he listened to in the cornsilk and the tassels, the wind that combed his red beard zero mornings when the snow lay white on the yellow ears in the bushel basket at the corncrib,
The same wind will now blow over the place here where his hands must dream of Illinois corn.
