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.