Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Year 6; Poetry

Selected Poems
of

Carl Sandburg

1878-1967

JAZZ FANTASIA

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes, sob on the long cool winding saxophones. Go to it, O jazzmen.

Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go hushahusha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.

Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome tree-tops, moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang! you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns, tin cans—make two people fight on the top of a stairway and scratch each other’s eyes in a clinch tumbling down the stairs.

Can the rough stuff ... now a Mississippi steamboat pushes up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo ... and the green lanterns calling to the high soft stars ... a red moon rides on the humps of the low river hills ... go to it, O jazzmen.

UNDER A TELEPHONE POLE

I am a copper wire slung in the air,

Slim against the sun I make not even a clear line of shadow.

Night and day I keep singing-humming and thrumming:

It is love and war and money; it is the fighting and the tears, the work and want,

Death and laughter of men and women passing through me, carrier of your speech,

In the rain and the wet dripping, in the dawn and the shine drying,

A copper wire.

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

FLUX

Sand of the sea runs red

Where the sunset reaches and quivers.

Sand of the sea runs yellow

Where the moon slants and wavers.

MONOTONE

The monotone of the rain is beautiful,

And the sudden rise and slow relapse

Of the long multitudinous rain.

The sun on the hills is beautiful,

Or a captured sunset sea-flung,

Bannered with fire and gold.

A face I know is beautiful—

With fire and gold of sky and sea,

And the peace of long warm rain.

BACK YARD

Shine on, O moon of summer.

Shine to the leaves of grass, catalpa and oak,

All silver under your rain to-night.

An Italian boy is sending songs to you tonight from an accordion.

A Polish boy is out with his best girl; they marry next month; tonight they are throwing you kisses.

An old man next door is dreaming over a sheen that sits in a cherry tree in his back yard.

The clocks say I must go—I stay here sitting on the back porch drinking white thoughts you rain down.

Shine on, O moon,

Shake out more and more silver changes.

CHILD MOON

The child’s wonder

At the old moon

Comes back nightly.

She points her finger

To the far silent yellow thing

Shining through the branches

Filtering on the leaves a golden sand,

Crying with her little tongue, “See the moon!”

And in her bed fading to sleep

With babblings of the moon on her little mouth.

DOCKS

Strolling along

By the teeming docks,

I watch the ships put out.

Black ships that heave and lunge

And move like mastodons

Arising from lethargic sleep.

The fathomed harbor

Calls them not nor dares

Them to a strain of action,

But outward, on and outward,

Sounding low-reverberating calls,

Shaggy in the half-lit distance,

They pass the pointed headland,

View the wide, far-lifting wilderness

And leap with cumulative speed

To test the challenge of the sea.

Plunging,

Doggedly onward plunging,

Into salt and mist and foam and sun.

LOST

Desolate and lone

All night long on the lake

Where fog trails and mist creeps,

The whistle of a boat

Calls and cries unendingly,

Like some lost child

In tears and trouble

Hunting the harbor’s breast

And the harbor’s eyes.

MARGARET

Many birds and the beating of wings

Make a flinging reckless hum

In the early morning at the rocks

Above the blue pool

Where the gray shadows swim lazy.

In your blue eyes, O reckless child,

I saw today many little wild wishes,

Eager as the great morning.

WINDOW

Night from a railroad car window

Is a great, dark, soft thing

Broken across with slashes of light.

YOUNG SEA

The sea is never still.

It pounds on the shore

Restless as a young heart,

Hunting.

The sea speaks

And only the stormy hearts

Know what it says:

It is the face
of a rough mother speaking.

The sea is young.

One storm cleans all the hoar

And loosens the age of it.

I hear it laughing, reckless.

They love the sea,

Men who ride on it

And know they will die

Under the salt of it

Let only the young come,

Says the sea.

Let them kiss my face

And hear me.

I am the last word

And I tell

Where storms and stars come from.

BABY FACE

White moon comes in on a baby face.

The shafts across her bed are flimmering.

Out on the land White Moon shines,

Shines and glimmers against gnarled shadows,

All silver to slow twisted shadows

Falling across the long road that runs from the house.

Keep a little of your beauty

And some of your flimmering silver

For her by the window to-night

Where you come in, White Moon.

GOLDWING MOTH

A goldwing moth is between the scissors and the ink bottle on the desk.

Last night it flew hundreds of circles around a glass bulb and a flame wire.

The wings are a soft gold; it is the gold of illuminated initials in manuscripts of the medieval monks.

PRAYERS OF STEEL

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.

Let me pry loose old walls.

Let me lift and loosen old foundations.

Lay me on an anvil, O God.

Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.

Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.

Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.

Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.

IMPROVED FARMLAND

Tall timber stood here once, here on a corn belt farm along the Monon.

Here the roots of a half mile of trees dug their runners deep in the loam for a grip and a hold against wind storms.

Then the axmen came and the chips flew to the zing of steel and handle the lank railsplitters cut the big ones first, the beeches and the oaks, then the brush.

Dynamite, wagons and horses took the stumps—the plows sunk their teeth in—now it is first class corn land—improved property—and the hogs grunt over the fodder crops.

It would come hard now for this half mile of improved farm land along the Monon corn belt, on a piece of Grand Prairie, to remember once it had a great singing family of trees.

PRIMER LESSON

Look out how you use proud words.

When you let proud words go it is not easy to call them back.

They wear long boots, hard boots; they walk off proud; they can’t hear you calling—

Look out how you use proud words.

BABY TOES

There is a blue star, Janet,

Fifteen years’ ride from us,

If we ride a hundred miles an hour.

There is a white star, Janet,

Forty years’ ride from us,

If we ride a hundred miles an hour.

Shall we ride

To the blue star

Or the white star?

BASKET

Speak, sir, and be wise.

Speak choosing your words, sir, like an old woman over a bushel of apples.

FIVE CENT BALLOONS

Pietro has twenty red and blue balloons on a string.

They flutter and dance pulling Pietro’s arm.

A nickel apiece is what they sell for.

Wishing children tag Pietro’s heels.

He sells out and goes the streets alone.

GOOD NIGHT

Many ways to spell good night.

Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.

They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.

Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue and then go out.

Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.

Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying in a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to a razorback hill.

It is easy to spell good night.

Many ways to spell good night.

HARVEST SUNSET

Red gold of pools,

Sunset furrows six o’clock,

And the farmer done in the fields

And the cows in the barns with bulging udders.

Take the cows and the farmer,

Take the barns and bulging udders.

Leave the red gold of pools

And sunset furrows six o’clock.

The farmer’s wife is singing.

The farmer’s boy is whistling.

I wash my hands in red gold of pools.

HATS

Hats, where do you belong?

What is under you?

On the rim of a skyscraper’s forehead

I looked down and saw: hats: fifty thousand hats:

Swarming with a noise of bees and sheep, cattle and waterfalls,

Stopping with a silence of sea grass, a silence of prairie corn.

Hats: tell me your high hopes.

LANGUAGES

There are no handles upon a language

Whereby men take hold of it

And mark it with signs for its remembrance.

It is a river, this language,

Once in a thousand years

Breaking a new course

Changing its way to the ocean.

It is mountain effluvia

Moving to valleys

And from nation to nation

Crossing borders and mixing.

Languages die like rivers.

Words wrapped round your tongue today

And broken to shape of thought

Between your teeth and lips speaking

Now and today

Shall be faded hieroglyphics

Ten thousand years from now.

Sing—and singing—remember

Your song dies and changes

And is not here to-morrow

Any more than the wind

Blowing ten thousand years ago.

MANUAL SYSTEM

Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears

And sits all day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in.

Flashes and flashes—voices and voices calling for ears to pour words in

Faces at the ends of wires asking for other faces at the ends of other wires:

All day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in,

Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears.

PEOPLE WHO MUST

I painted on the roof of a skyscraper.

I painted a long while and called it a day’s work.

The people on a corner swarmed and the traffic cop’s whistle never let up all afternoon.

They were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way—

Those people on the go or at a standstill;

And the traffic cop a spot of blue, a splinter of brass,

Where the black tides ran around him

And he kept the street. I painted a long while

And called it a day’s work.

POTOMAC TOWN IN FEBRUARY

The bridge says: Come across, try me; see how good I am.

The big rock in the river says: Look at me; learn how to stand up.

The white water says: I go on; around, under, over, I go on.

A kneeling, scraggly pine says: I am here yet; they nearly got me last year.

A sliver of moon slides by on a high wind calling: I know why; I’ll see you to-morrow; I’ll tell you everything to-morrow.

SEA-WASH

The sea-wash never ends.

The sea-wash repeats, repeats.

Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows?

Only the old strong songs?

Is that all?

The sea-wash repeats, repeats.

SUMMER STARS

Bend low again, night of summer stars.

So near you are, sky of summer stars,

So near, a long arm man can pick off stars,

Pick off what he wants in the sky bowl,

So near you are, summer stars,

So near, strumming, strumming,

So lazy and hum-strumming.

CHICAGO

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,

Shoveling,

Wrecking,

Planning,

Building, breaking, rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,

Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man laughs,

Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,

Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse, and under his ribs the heart of the people,

Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.