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.