Carl Sandburg – 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.

Carl Sandburg – Knucks

In Abraham Lincoln’s city,

Where they remember his lawyer’s shingle,

The place where they brought him

Wrapped in battle flags,

Wrapped in the smoke of memories

From Tallahassee to the Yukon,

The place now where the shaft of his tomb

Points white against the blue prairie dome,

In Abraham Lincoln’s city ... I saw knucks

In the window of Mister Fischman’s second-hand store

On Second Street.

I went in and asked, “How much?”

“Thirty cents apiece,” answered Mister Fischman.

And taking a box of new ones off a shelf

He filled anew the box in the showcase

And said incidentally, most casually

And incidentally:

“I sell a carload a month of these.”

I slipped my fingers into a set of knucks,

Cast-iron knucks molded in a foundry pattern,

And there came to me a set of thoughts like these:

Mister Fischman is for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff,

And the street car strikers and the strike-breakers,

And the sluggers, gunmen, detectives, policemen,

Judges, utility heads, newspapers, priests, lawyers,

They are all for Abe and the “malice to none” stuff.

I started for the door.

“Maybe you want a lighter pair,”

Came Mister Fischman’s voice.

I opened the door ... and the voice again:

“You are a funny customer.”

Wrapped in battle flags,

Wrapped in the smoke of memories,

This is the place they brought him,

This is Abraham Lincoln's home town.

Cornhuskers (1918)

Carl Sandburg – 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.

Carl Sandburg – Harrison Street Court

I HEARD a woman's lips

Speaking to a companion

Say these words:

"A woman what hustles

Never keeps nothin'

For all her hustlin'.

Somebody always gets

What she goes on the street for.

If it ain't a pimp

It's a bull what gets it.

I been hustlin' now

Till I ain't much good any more.

I got nothin' to show for it.

Some man got it all,

Every night's hustlin' I ever did."

Carl Sandburg – The Harbor

Passing through huddled and ugly walls,

By doorways where women haggard

Looked from their hunger-deep eyes,

Haunted with shadows of hunger-hands,

Out from the huddled and ugly walls,

I came sudden, at the city's edge,

On a blue burst of lake,

Long lake waves breaking under the sun

On a spray-flung curve of shore;

And a fluttering storm of gulls,

Masses of great gray wings

And flying white bellies

Veering and wheeling free in the open.

Carl Sandburg – Fire Dreams

(Written to be read aloud, if so be, Thanksgiving Day)

I remember here by the fire,

In the flickering reds and saffrons,

They came in a ramshackle tub,

Pilgrims in tall hats,

Pilgrims of iron jaws,

Drifting by weeks on beaten seas,

And the random chapters say

They were glad and sang to God.

And so

Since the iron-jawed men sat down

And said, "Thanks, O God,"

For life and soup and a little less

Than a hobo handout to-day,

Since gray winds blew gray patterns of sleet on Plymouth Rock,

Since the iron-jawed men sang "Thanks, O God,"

You and I, O Child of the West,

Remember more than ever

November and the hunter's moon,

November and the yellow-spotted hills.

And so

In the name of the iron-jawed men

I will stand up and say yes till the finish is come and gone.

God of all broken hearts, empty hands, sleeping soldiers,

God of all star-flung beaches of night sky,

I and my love-child stand up together to-day and sing: "Thanks, O God."

Carl Sandburg – Paula

Nothing else in this song-only your face.

Nothing else here-only your drinking, night-gray eyes.

The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel.

I stand on the pier and sing how I know you mornings.

It is not your eyes, your face, I remember.

It is not your dancing, race-horse feet.

It is something else I remember you for on the pier mornings.

Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me.

Your shoulder brushes my arm-a south-west wind crosses the pier.

I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again:

Nothing else in this song-only your face.

Nothing else here-only your drinking, night-gray eyes.

Carl Sandburg – Dream Girl

You will come one day in a waver of love,

Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,

The tan of the sun will be on your skin,

The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,

You will pose with a hill-flower grace.

You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,

A poise of the head no sculptor has caught

And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,

Your face in a pass-and-repass of moods

As many as skies in delicate change

Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.

Yet,

You may not come, O girl of a dream,

We may but pass as the world goes by

And take from a look of eyes into eyes,

A film of hope and a memoried day.

Carl Sandburg – Do You Want Affidavits

THERE'S a hole in the bottom of the sea.

Do you want affidavits?

There's a man in the moon with money for you.

Do you want affidavits?

There are ten dancing girls in a sea-chamber off Nantucket waiting for you.

There are tall candles in Timbuctoo burning penance for you.

There are-anything else?

Speak now-for now we stand amid the great wishing windows-and the law says we are free to be wishing all this week at the windows.

Shall I raise my right hand and swear to you in the monotone of a notary public? this is 'the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.'

Carl Sandburg – Happiness

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.

They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though

I was trying to fool with them

And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along

the Desplaines river

And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with

their women and children and a keg of beer and an

accordion.

Carl Sandburg – Waiting

Today I will let the old boat stand

Where the sweep of the harbor tide comes in

To the pulse of a far, deep-steady sway.

And I will rest and dream and sit on the deck

Watching the world go by

And take my pay for many hard days gone I remember.

I will choose what clouds I like

In the great white fleets that wander the blue

As I lie on my back or loaf at the rail.

And I will listen as the veering winds kiss me and fold me

And put on my brow the touch of the world's great will.

Daybreak will hear the heart of the boat beat,

Engine throb and piston play

In the quiver and leap at call of life.

To-morrow we move in the gaps and heights

On changing floors of unlevel seas

And no man shall stop us and no man follow

For ours is the quest of an unknown shore

And we are husky and lusty and shouting-gay.

Carl Sandburg – Graceland

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

For upkeep and flowers

To keep fresh the memory of the dead.

The merchant prince gone to dust

Commanded in his written will

Over the signed name of his last testament

Twenty-five thousand dollars be set aside

For roses, lilacs, hydrangeas, tulips,

For perfume and color, sweetness of remembrance

Around his last long home.

(A hundred cash girls want nickels to go to the movies to-night.

In the back stalls of a hundred saloons, women are at tables

Drinking with men or waiting for men jingling loose silver dollars in their pockets.

In a hundred furnished rooms is a girl who sells silk or dress goods or leather stuff for

six dollars a week wages

And when she pulls on her stockings in the morning she is reckless about God and the

newspapers and the police, the talk of her home town or the name people call her.)

Carl Sandburg – Doors

An open door says, “Come in.”

A shut door says, “Who are you?”

Shadows and ghosts go through shut doors.

If a door is shut and you want it shut,

     why open it?

If a door is open and you want it open,

     why shut it?

Doors forget but only doors know what it is

     doors forget.

Carl Sandburg – Cool Tombs

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes ... in the dust, in the cool tombs.

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? ... in the dust, in the cool tombs?

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns ... tell me if the lovers are losers ... tell me if any get more than the lovers ... in the dust ... in the cool tombs.

Carl Sandburg – Bronzes

I

The bronze General Grant riding a bronze horse in Lincoln Park

Shrivels in the sun by day when the motor cars whirr by in long processions 

going somewhere to keep apppointment for dinner and matineés and buying and selling

Though in the dusk and nightfall when high waves are piling

On the slabs of the promenade along the lake shore near by

I have seen the general dare the combers come closer

And make to ride his bronze horse out into the hoofs and guns of the storm.

II

I cross Lincoln Park on a winter night when the snow is falling.

Lincoln in bronze stands among the white lines of snow, 

his bronze forehead meeting soft echoes of the newsies crying forty thousand men are dead along the Yser, 

his bronze ears listening to the mumbled roar of the city at his bronze feet.

A lithe Indian on a bronze pony, Shakespeare seated with long legs in bronze, 

Garibaldi in a bronze cape, they hold places in the cold, 

lonely snow to-night on their pedestals and so they will hold them past midnight and into the dawn.

Carl Sandburg – Boy and Father

The boy Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.

The leather law books of Alexander’s father fill a room like hay in a barn.

Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build,

 a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books.

   The rain beats on the windows

   And the raindrops run down the window glass

   And the raindrops slide off the green blinds down the siding.

The boy Alexander dreams of Napoleon in John C. Abbott’s history, 

Napoleon the grand and lonely man wronged, Napoleon in his life wronged and in his memory wronged.

The boy Alexander dreams of the cat Alice saw, 

the cat fading off into the dark and leaving the teeth of its Cheshire smile lighting the gloom.

Buffaloes, blizzards, way down in Texas, in the panhandle of Texas snuggling close to New Mexico,

These creep into Alexander’s dreaming by the window when his father talks

 with strange men about land down in Deaf Smith County.

Alexander’s father tells the strange men: Five years ago we ran a Ford out on the prairie and chased antelopes.

Only once or twice in a long while has Alexander heard his father say ‘my first wife’ so-and-so and such-and-such.

A few times softly the father has told Alexander, 

‘Your mother . . . was a beautiful woman . . . but we won’t talk about her.’

Always Alexander listens with a keen listen when he hears his father mention ‘my first wife’ or ‘Alexander’s mother.’

Alexander’s father smokes a cigar and the Episcopal rector smokes a cigar, 

and the words come often: mystery of life, mystery of life.

These two come into Alexander’s head blurry and grey while the rain beats on the windows 

and the raindrops run down the window glass and the raindrops slide off the green blinds and down the siding.

These and: There is a God, there must be a God, how can there be rain or sun unless there is a God?

So from the wrongs of Napoleon and the Cheshire cat smile on to the buffaloes and blizzards of Texas 

and on to his mother and to God, so the blurry grey rain dreams of Alexander have gone on five minutes, 

maybe ten, keeping slow easy time to the raindrops on the window glass and the raindrops sliding off the green blinds and down the siding.

Carl Sandburg – The Abracadabra Boys

The abracadabra boys—have they been in the stacks and cloisters? Have they picked up languages for throwing into chow mein poems?

Have they been to a sea of jargons and brought back jargons? Their salutations go: Who cometh? and, It ith I cometh.

They know postures from impostures, pistils from pustules, to hear them tell it. They foregather and make pitty pat with each other in Latin and in their private pig Latin, very ofay.

They give with passwords. “Who cometh?” “A kumquat cometh.” “And how cometh the kumquat?” “On an abbadabba, ancient and honorable sire, ever and ever on an abbadabba.”

Do they have fun? Sure—their fun is being what they are, like our fun is being what we are—only they are more sorry for us being what we are than we are for them being what they are.

Pointing at you, at us, at the rabble, they sigh and say, these abracadabra boys, “They lack jargons. They fail to distinguish between pustules and pistils. They knoweth not how the kumquat cometh.”

Carl Sandburg – 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.

Carl Sandburg – Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio

It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and cornet razzes.

The trombone pony neighs and the tuba jackass snorts.

The banjo tickles and titters too awful.

The chippies talk about the funnies in the papers.

     The cartoonists weep in their beer.

     Ship riveters talk with their feet

     To the feet of floozies under the tables.

A quartet of white hopes mourn with interspersed snickers:

        "I got the blues.

        I got the blues.

        I got the blues."

And . . . as we said earlier:

     The cartoonists weep in their beer.

Carl Sandburg – Wilderness

There is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … 

a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—

I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave 

it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me … a silver-gray fox … 

I sniff and guess … 

I pick things out of the wind and air … 

I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers … 

I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me … a snout and a belly … 

a machinery for eating and grunting … 

a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—

I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me … I know I came from saltblue water-gates … 

I scurried with shoals of herring … 

I blew waterspouts with porpoises … 

before land was … 

before the water went down …

before Noah … 

before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me … clambering-clawed … dog-faced … 

yawping a galoot’s hunger … hairy under the armpits … 

here are the hawk-eyed hankering men … here are the blond and blue-eyed women … 

here they hide curled asleep waiting … ready to snarl and kill … 

ready to sing and give milk … waiting—

I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird … 

and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams 

and fights among the Sierra crags of what 

I want … and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, 

warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, 

gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—

And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, 

under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—

and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, 

a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: 

it came from God-Knows-Where: 

it is going to God-Knows-Where—

For I am the keeper of the zoo: 

I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: 

I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.