Work poems
/ page 328 of 355 /
Accomplished Facts
© Carl Sandburg
EVERY year Emily Dickinson sent one friend
the first arbutus bud in her garden.
In a last will and testament Andrew Jackson
A Fence
© Carl Sandburg
NOW the stone house on the lake front is finished and the
workmen are beginning the fence.
The palings are made of iron bars with steel points that
can stab the life out of any man who falls on them.
The Shovel Man
© Carl Sandburg
ON the street
Slung on his shoulder is a handle half way across,
Tied in a big knot on the scoop of cast iron
Are the overalls faded from sun and rain in the ditches;
The Lawyers Know Too Much
© Carl Sandburg
THE LAWYERS, Bob, know too much.
They are chums of the books of old John Marshall.
They know it all, what a dead hand wrote,
A stiff dead hand and its knuckles crumbling,
Psalm of Those Who Go Forth Before Daylight
© Carl Sandburg
THE POLICEMAN buys shoes slow and careful;
the teamster buys gloves slow and careful;
they take care of their feet and hands;
they live on their feet and hands.
Child of the Romans
© Carl Sandburg
THE dago shovelman sits by the railroad track
Eating a noon meal of bread and bologna.
A train whirls by, and men and women at tables
Alive with red roses and yellow jonquils,
I Am The People, The Mob
© Carl Sandburg
I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is
done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the
Skyscraper
© Carl Sandburg
Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the
earth and hold the building to a turning planet.
Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and
hold together the stone walls and floors.
Happiness
© Carl Sandburg
I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell
me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of
thousands of men.
Ready to Kill
© Carl Sandburg
TEN minutes now I have been looking at this.
I have gone by here before and wondered about it.
This is a bronze memorial of a famous general
Riding horseback with a flag and a sword and a revolver
Grass
© Carl Sandburg
PILE the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work
I am the grass; I cover all.
To A Cat
© Jorge Luis Borges
Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
Instants
© Jorge Luis Borges
I was one of those who never goes anywhere
without a thermometer,
without a hot-water bottle,
and without an umberella and without a parachute,
Sancta Maria, Succurre Miseris
© Amy Lowell
Dear Virgin Mary, far away,
Look down from Heaven while I pray.
Open your golden casement high,
And lean way out beyond the sky.
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
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.
The Boston Athenaeum
© Amy Lowell
Thou dear and well-loved haunt of happy hours,
How often in some distant gallery,
Gained by a little painful spiral stair,
Far from the halls and corridors where throng
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.
