Carl Sandburg – Grass

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.   

Shovel them under and let me work—   

            I am the grass; I cover all.   

   

And pile them high at Gettysburg   

And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. 

Shovel them under and let me work.   

Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:   

            What place is this?   

            Where are we now?   

   

            I am the grass. 

            Let me work.

Carl Sandburg – Handfuls

Blossoms of babies

Blinking their stories

Come soft

On the dusk and the babble;

Little red gamblers,

Handfuls that slept in the dust.

Summers of rain,

Winters of drift,

Tell of the years;

And they go back

Who came soft—

Back to the sod,

To silence and dust;

Gray gamblers,

   Handfuls again.

Carl Sandburg – Poems Done on a Late Night Car

I. CHICKENS

I am The Great White Way of the city:  

When you ask what is my desire, I answer:  

"Girls fresh as country wild flowers,  

With young faces tired of the cows and barns,  

Eager in their eyes as the dawn to find my mysteries,

Slender supple girls with shapely legs,  

Lure in the arch of their little shoulders  

And wisdom from the prairies to cry only softly at the ashes of my mysteries."  

  

II. USED UP

Lines based on certain regrets that come with rumination

upon the painted faces of women on North Clark Street, Chicago

          Roses,  

        Red roses,

          Crushed  

In the rain and wind  

Like mouths of women  

Beaten by the fists of  

Men using them. 

  O little roses  

  And broken leaves  

  And petal wisps:  

You that so flung your crimson  

  To the sun

Only yesterday.  

  

III. HOME

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:  

I heard it in the air of one night when I listened  

To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness. 

Carl Sandburg – Cahoots

Play it across the table.

What if we steal this city blind?

If they want any thing let 'em nail it down.

Harness bulls, dicks, front office men,

And the high goats up on the bench,

Ain't they all in cahoots?

Ain't it fifty-fifty all down the line,

Petemen, dips, boosters, stick-ups and guns—

        what's to hinder?

        Go fifty-fifty.

If they nail you call in a mouthpiece.

Fix it, you gazump, you slant-head, fix it.

        Feed 'em. . . .

Nothin' ever sticks to my fingers, nah, nah,

        nothin' like that,

But there ain't no law we got to wear mittens—

        huh—is there?

Mittens, that's a good one—mittens!

There oughta be a law everybody wear mittens.

Carl Sandburg – Remorse

The horse's name was Remorse.

There were people said, "Gee, what a nag!"

And they were Edgar Allan Poe bugs and so

They called him Remorse.

                                    When he was a gelding

He flashed his heels to other ponies

And threw dust in the noses of other ponies

And won his first race and his second

And another and another and hardly ever

Came under the wire behind the other runners.

And so, Remorse, who is gone, was the hero of a play

By Henry Blossom, who is now gone.

What is there to a monicker? Call me anything.

A nut, a cheese, something that the cat brought in. Nick me with any old name.

Class me up for a fish, a gorilla, a slant head, an egg, a ham.

Only ... slam me across the ears sometimes ... and hunt for a white star

In my forehead and twist the bang of my forelock around it.

Make a wish for me. Maybe I will light out like a streak of wind.