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.

291And 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.

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,

292I 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.

SKETCH

The shadows of the ships

Rock on the crest

In the low blue lustre

Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide.

A long brown bar at the dip of the sky

Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt.

The lucid and endless wrinkles

Draw in, lapse and withdraw.

Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles

Wash on the floor of the beach.

Rocking on the crest

In the low blue lustre

Are the shadows of the ships.

LOST

Desolate and lone

All night long on the lake

Where fog trails and mist creeps,

The whistle of a boat

293Calls and cries unendingly,

Like some lost child

In tears and trouble

Hunting the harbor’s breast

And the harbor’s eyes.

JAN KUBELIK

Your bow swept over a string, and a long low note quivered to the air.

(A mother of Bohemia sobs over a new child, perfect, learning to suck milk.)

Your bow ran fast over all the high strings fluttering and wild.

(All the girls in Bohemia are laughing on a Sunday afternoon in the hills with their lovers.)

AT A WINDOW

Give me hunger,

O you gods that sit and give

The world its orders.

Give me hunger, pain and want,

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame,

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,

A voice to speak to me in the day end,

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness.

In the dusk of day-shapes

Blurring the sunset,

One little wandering, western star

294Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window,

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk,

And wait and know the coming

Of a little love.

THE POOR

Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and was amazed;

On the beach where the long push under the endless tide maneuvers, I stood silent;

Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.

Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers,

mothers lifting their children—these all I touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.

And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the darkness of night—and all broken, humble ruins of nations.

THE ROAD AND THE END

I shall foot it

Down the roadway in the dusk,

Where shapes of hunger wander

And the fugitives of pain go by.

I shall foot it

In the silence of the morning,

See the night slur into dawn,

Hear the slow great winds arise

Where tall trees flank the way

And shoulder toward the sky.

295The broken boulders by the road

Shall not commemorate my ruin.

Regret shall be the gravel under foot.

I shall watch for

Slim birds swift of wing

That go where wind and ranks of thunder

Dive the wild processionals of rain.

The dust of the travelled road

Shall touch my hands and face.

KILLERS

I am singing to you

Soft as a man with a dead child speaks;

Hard as a man in handcuffs,

Held where he can not move:

Under the sun

Are sixteen million men,

Chosen for shining teeth,

Sharp eyes, hard legs,

And a running of young warm blood in their wrists.

And a red juice runs on the green grass;

And a red juice soaks the dark soil.

And the sixteen million are killing ... and killing and killing.

I never forget them day or night:

They beat on my head for memory of them;

They pound on my heart and I cry back to them,

To their homes and women, dreams and games.

296I wake in the night and smell the trenches,

And hear the low stir of sleepers in lines—

Sixteen million sleepers and pickets in the dark:

Some of them long sleepers for always,

Some of them tumbling to sleep to-morrow for always,

Fixed in the drag of the world’s heartbreak,

Eating and drinking, toiling ... on a long job of killing.

Sixteen million men.

NOCTURNE IN A DESERTED BRICKYARD

Stuff of the moon

Runs on the lapping sand

Out to the longest shadows.

Under the curving willows,

And round the creep of the wave line,

Fluxions of yellow and dusk on the waters

Make a wide dreaming pansy of an old pond in the night.

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 off the years;

And they go back

297Who came soft—

Back to the sod,

To silence and dust;

Gray gamblers,

Handfuls again.

UNDER THE HARVEST MOON

Under the harvest moon,

When the soft silver

Drips shimmering

Over the garden nights,

Death, the gray mocker,

Comes and whispers to you

As a beautiful friend

Who remembers.

Under the summer roses

When the flagrant crimson

Lurks in the dusk

Of the wild red leaves,

Love, with little hands,

Comes and touches you

With a thousand memories,

And asks you

Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

CHOOSE

The single clenched fist lifted and ready,

Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.

Choose:

For we meet by one or the other.

298

KIN

Brother, I am fire

Surging under the ocean floor.

I shall never meet you, brother—

Not for years, anyhow;

Maybe thousands of years, brother.

Then I will warm you,

Hold you close, wrap you in circles,

Use you and change you—

Maybe thousands of years, brother.

PLACES

Roses and gold

For you today,

And the flash of flying flags.

I will have

Ashes,

Dust in my hair,

Crushes of hoofs.

Your name

Fills the mouth

Of rich man and poor.

Women bring

Armfuls of flowers

And throw on you.

I go hungry

Down in dreams

And loneliness,

Across the rain

To slashed hills

Where men wait and hope for me.

299

JOY

Let a joy keep you.

Reach out your hands

And take it when it runs by,

As the Apache dancer

Clutches his woman.

I have seen them

Live long and laugh loud,

Sent on singing, singing,

Smashed to the heart

Under the ribs

With a terrible love.

Joy always,

Joy everywhere—

Let joy kill you!

Keep away from the little deaths.

THE GREAT HUNT

I can not tell you now;

When the wind’s drive and whirl

Blow me along no longer,

And the wind’s a whisper at last—

Maybe I’ll tell you then—

some other time.

When the rose’s flash to the sunset

Reels to the wrack and the twist,

And the rose is a red bygone,

When the face I love is going

And the gate to the end shall clang,

And it’s no use to beckon or say, “So long”—

Maybe I’ll tell you then—

some other time.

300I never knew any more beautiful than you:

I have hunted you under my thoughts,

I have broken down under the wind

And into the roses looking for you.

I shall never find any

greater than you.

OUR PRAYER OF THANKS

God,

For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river,

Our prayer of thanks.

God,

For the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass,

Our prayer of thanks.

God,

For the sunset and the stars, the women and their white arms that hold us,

Our prayer of thanks.

God,

If you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,

God, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles on the edge of town, or the reckless dead of war days thrown unknown in pits, if these dead are forever deaf and blind and lost,

Our prayer of thanks.

God,

The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so, for the break of the game and the first play and the last,

Our prayer of thanks.

301