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.