Pennsylvania

I have been in Pennsylvania,

In the Monongahela and Hocking Valleys.

In the blue susquehanna

On a Saturday morning

I saw a mounted constabulary go by,

I saw boys playing marbles.

Spring and the hills laughed.

And in places

Along the Appalachian chain,

I saw steel arms handling coal and iron,

And I saw the white-cauliflower faces

Of miner's wives waiting for the men to come home from the day's work.

I made color studies in crimson and violet

Over the dust and domes of culm at sunset.

Carl Sandburg

People Who Must

I painted on the roof of a skyscraper.

I painted a long while and called it a day's work.

The people on the corner swarmed and the traffic cop's whistle never let up all afternoon.

They were the same as bugs, many bugs on their way--

These people on the go or at a standstill;

And the traffic cop a spot of blue, a splinter of brass,

Where the black tids ran around him

And he kept the street. I painted a long while

And called it a day's work.

Carl Sandburg

They All Want to Play Hamlet

They all want to play Hamlet.

They have not exactly seen their fathers killed

Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,

Nor an Ophelia lying with dust gagging the heart,

Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,

Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of flowers--O flowers, flowers slung by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare ever wrote;

Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then to say over slow and over slow wise, keen, beautiful words asking the heart that's breaking, breaking,

This is something that calls and calls to their blood.

They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.

Carl Sandburg

The Mayor of Gary

I asked the mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.

And the mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in the United States.

"Go into the plants and you will see men sitting around doing nothing--machinery does everything," said the mayor of Gary when I asked him about the 12-hour day and the 7-day week.

And he wore cool cream pants, the Mayor of Gary, and white shoes, and a barber had fixed him up with a shampoo and a shave and he was east and imperturbable though the government weather bureau thermometer said 96 and children were soaking their heads at bubbling fountains on the street corners.

And I said good-bye to the Mayor of Gary and I went out from the city hall and turned the corner into Broadway.

And I saw workmen wearing leather shoes scruffed with fire and cinders, and pitted with little holes from running molten steel,

And some had bunches of specialized muscles around their shoulder blades hard as pig iron, muscles of their forearms were sheet steel and they looked to me like men who had been somewhere.

[GARY, INDIANNA, 1915]

Carl Sandburg

Omaha

Red barns and red heiffers spot the green

grass circles around Omaha--the farmers

haul tanks of cream and wagon-loads of

cheese.

Shale hogbacks across the river at Council

Bluffs--and shanties hang by an eyelash to

the hill slants back around Omaha.

A span of steel ties up the kin of Iowa and

Nebraska across the yellow, big-hoofed Missouri

River.

Omaha, the roughneck, feeds armies,

Eats and swears from a dirty face.

Omaha works to get the world a breakfast.

Carl Sandburg

Manual System

Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears

And sits all day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in.

Flashes and flashes--voies and voices

                calling for ears to put words in

Faces at the ends of wires asking for other faces

                at the ends of other wires:

All day taking plugs out and sticking plugs in,

Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears.

Carl Sandburg

Honky Tonk in Cleveland, Ohio

It's a jazz affair, drum crashes and coronet 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.

Shop 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

Soup

I saw the famous man eating soup.

I say he was lifting a fat broth

Into his mouth with a spoon.

His name was in the newspapers that day

Spelled out in tall black headlines

And thousands of people were talking about him.

When I saw him,

He sat bending his head over a plate

Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.

Carl Sandburg

Blue Island Intersection

Six streets come together here.

They feed people and wagons into the center.

In and out all day horses with thoughts of nose-bags,

Men with shovels, women with baskets and baby-buggies.

Six ends of streets and no sleep for them all day.

The people and wagons come and go, out and in.

Triangles of banks and drug stores watch.

The policemen whistle, the trolly cars bump:

Wheels, wheels, feet, feet, all day.

In the false dawn when the chickens blink

And the east shakes a lazy baby toe at tomorrow,

And the east fixes a lazy pink half-eye this way,

In the time when only one milk wagon crosses

These three streets, these six street ends,

It is the sleep time and they rest.

The triangle banks and the drug stores rest.

The policeman is gone, his star and gun sleep.

The owl car blutters along in a sleep walk.

Carl Sandburg

Neighbors

On Forty-first Street

near Eighth Avenue

a frame house wobbles.

If houses went on crutches

this house would be

one of the cripples.

A sign on the house:

Church of the Living God

And Rescue Home for Orphan Children.

From a Greek coffee house

Across the street

A cabalistic jargon

Jabbers back.

And men at tables

Spill Peloponnesian syllables

And speak of shovels for street work.

And the new embankments of the Erie Railroad

At Painted Post, Horse's Head, Salamanca.

Carl Sandburg

The Hangman at Home

What does a hangman think about

When he goes home at night from work?

When he sits down with his wife and

Children for a cup of coffee and a

Plate of ham and eggs, do they ask

Him if it was a good day's work

And everything went well or do they

Stay off some topics and kill about

The weather, baseball, politics

And the comic strips in the papers

And the movies? Do they look at his

Hands when he reaches for the coffee

Or the ham and eggs? If the little

Ones say, Daddy, play horse, here's

A rope--does he answer like a joke:

I seen enough rope for today?

Or does his face light up like a

Bonfire of joy and does he say:

It's a good and dandy world we live

'In. And if a white face moon looks

In through a window where a baby girl

Sleeps and the moon-gleams mix with

Baby ears and baby hair--the hangman--

How does he act then? It must be easy

For him. Anything is easy for a hangman,

I guess.

Carl Sandburg

Aprons of Silence

Many things I might have said today.

And I kept my mouth shut.

So many times I was asked

To come and say the same things

Everybody was saying, no end

To the yes-yes, yes-yes,

me-too, me-too.

The aprons of silence covered me.

A wire and hatch held my tongue.

I spit nails into an abyss and listened.

I shut off the gable of Jones, Johnson, Smith,

All whose names take pages in the city directory.

I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.

I locked myself in and nobody knew it.

Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow

Knew it--on the streets, in the post office,

On the cars, into the railroad station

Where the caller was calling, "All a-board,

All a-board for . . . Blaa-blaa . . . Blaa-blaa,

Blaa-blaa . . . and all points northwest . . .all a-board."

Here I took along my own hoosegow

And did business with my own thoughts.

Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.

Carl Sandburg

Good Night

Many ways to say good night.

Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July

spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.

They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.

Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blue

and then go out.

Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.

Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to razorback hill.

It is easy to spell good night.

                        Many ways to spell good night.

Carl Sandburg

Shirt

My shirt is a token and symbol,

more than a cover for sun and rain,

my shirt is a signal,

and a teller of souls.

I can take off my shirt and tear it,

and so make a ripping razzly noise,

and the people will say,

"Look at him tear his shirt."

I can keep my shirt on.

I can stick around and sing like a little bird

and look 'em all in the eye and never be fazed.

I can keep my shirt on.

Carl Sandburg

Dusty Doors

Child of the Aztec gods,

how long must we listen here,

how long before we go?

The dust is deep on the lintels.

The dust is dark on the doors.

If the dreams shake our bones,

what can we say or do?

Since early morning we waited.

Since early, early morning, child.

There must be dreams on the way now.

There must be a song for our bones.

The dust gets deeper and darker.

Do the doors and lintels shudder?

How long must we listen here?

How long before we go?

Carl Sandburg

Threes

I was a boy when I heard three red words

a thousand Frenchmen died in the streets

for: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity--I asked

why men die for words.

I was older; men with mustaches, sideburns,

lilacs, told me the high golden words are:

Mother, Home, and Heaven--other older men with

face decorations said: God, Duty, Immortality

--they sang these threes slow from deep lungs.

Years ticked off their say-so on the great clocks

of doom and damnation, soup, and nuts: meteors flashed

their say-so: and out of great Russia cam three

dusky syllables workmen took guns and went out to die

for: Bread, Peace, Land.

And I met a marine of the U.S.A., a leatherneck with a girl on his knee

for a memory in ports circling the earth and he said: Tell me how to say

three things and I always get by--gimme a plate of ham and eggs--how

much--and--do you love me, kid?

Carl Sandburg

A. E. F.

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,

The rifle grooves curling with flakes of rust.

A spider will make a silver string nest in the

darkest, warmest corner of it.

The trigger and the range-finder, they too will be rusty.

And no hands will polish the gun, and it will hang on the wall.

Forefingers and thumbs will point casually toward it.

It will be spoken among half-forgotten, whished-to-be-forgotten things.

They will tell the spider: Go on, you're doing good work.

Carl Sandburg

Bas-Relief

Five geese deploy mysteriously.

Onward proudly with flagstaffs,

Hearses with silver bugles,

Bushes of plum-blossoms dropping

For ten mystic web-feet--

Each his own drum-major,

Each charged with the honor

Of the ancient goose nation,

Each with a nose-length surpassing

The nose-lengths of rival nations.

Somberly, slowly, unimpeachably,

Five geese deploy mysteriously.

Carl Sandburg

Bronzes

They ask me to handle bronzes

Kept by children in China

Three thousand years

Since their fathers

Took fire and molds and hammers

And made these.

The Ming, the Chou,

And other dynasties,

Out, gone, reconed in ciphers,

Dynasties dressed up

In old gold and old yellow--

They saw these.

Let the wheels

Of three thousand years

Turn, turn, turn on.

Let one poet then

(One will be enough)

Handle these bronzes

And mention the dynasties

And pass them along.

Carl Sandburg

Sea-Wash

The sea-wash never ends.

The sea-wash repeats, repeats.

Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows?

Only the old strong songs?

Is that all?

The sea-wash repeats, repeats.

Carl Sandburg

Evening Waterfall

What is the name you called me?--

And why did you go so soon?

The crows lift their caws on the wind,

And the wind changed and was lonely.

The warblers cry thier sleepy-songs

Across the valley gloaming,

Across the cattle-horns of early stars.

Feathers and people in the crotch of a treetop

Throw an evening waterfall of sleepy-songs.

What is the name you called me?--

And why did you go so soon?

Carl Sandburg

Crucible

Hot gold runs a winding stream on the inside of a green bowl.

Yellow trickles in a fan figure, scatters a line of skirmishes, spreads a chorus of dancing girls, performs blazing ochre evolutions, gathers the whole show into one stream, forgets the past and rolls on.

The sea-mist green of the bowl's bottom is a dark throat of sky crossed by quarreling forks of umber and ochre and yellow changing faces.

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

Stars, Songs, Faces

Gather the stars if you wish it so.

Gather the songs and keep them.

Gather the faces of women.

Gather for keeping years and years.

And then . . .

Loosen your hands, let go and say goodby.

Let the stars and songs go.

Let the faces and years go.

Loosen your hands and say goodbye.

Carl Sandburg

Fire Pages

I will read ashes for you, if you ask me.

I will look on the fire and tell you from the gray lashes

And out of the red and black tongues and stripes,

I will tell how fire comes

And how fire runs far as the sea.

Carl Sandburg