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.

 

*

The Harbor

 

Passing through huddled and ugly walls

By doorways where women

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.

 

*

Mag

 

I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish you never quit your job and came along with me.
I wish we never bought a license and a white dress
For you to get married in the day we ran off to a minister

And told him we would love each other and take care of each other

Always and always long as the sun and the rain lasts anywhere.

Yes, I'm wishing now you lived somewhere away from here

And I was a bum on the bumpers a thousand miles away dead broke.

I wish the kids had never come
And rent and coal and clothes to pay for
And a grocery man calling for cash,
Every day cash for beans and prunes.
I wish to God I never saw you, Mag.
I wish to God the kids had never come.

 

*

Mamie

 

Mamie beat her head against the bars of a little Indiana town and dreamed of romance and big things off somewhere the way the railroad trains all ran.

She could see the smoke of the engines get lost down where the streaks of steel flashed in the sun and when the newspapers came in on the morning mail she knew there was a big Chicago far off, where all the trains ran.

She got tired of the barber shop boys and the post office chatter and the church gossip and the old pieces the band played on the Fourth of July and Decoration Day

And sobbed at her fate and beat her head against the bars and was going to kill herself
When the thought came to her that if she was going to die she might as well die struggling for a clutch of romance among the streets of Chicago.
She has a job now at six dollars a week in the basement of the Boston Store

And even now she beats her head against the bars in the same old way and wonders if there is a bigger place the railroads run to from Chicago where maybe there is

romance

and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash.

 

*

Under at Hit Rim

 

While the hum and the hurry

Of passing footfalls

Beat in my ear like the restless surf

Of a wind-blown sea,

A soul came to me

Out of the look on a face.

 

Eyes like a lake

Where a storm-wind roams

Caught me from under

The rim of a hat.

I thought of a midsea wreck
and bruised fingers clinging
to a broken state-room door.

 

*

Fog

 

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

 

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

 

*

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.

 

*

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.”

 

*

Sunset from an Omaha Hotel Window

 

Into the blue river hills

The red sun runners go

And the long sand changes

And to-day is a goner

And to-day is not worth haggling over.

 

Here in Omaha
The gloaming is bitter
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

 

The long sand changes.

To-day is a goner.

Time knocks in another brass nail.

Another yellow plunger shoots the dark.

 

Constellations
Wheeling over Omaha
As in Chicago
Or Kenosha.

 

The long sand is gone

and all the talk is stars.

They circle in a dome over Nebraska.

 

*

Adelaide Crapsey

 

Among the bumble-bees in red-top hay, a freckled field of brown-eyed Susans dripping yellow leaves in July,

I read your heart in a book.

 

And your mouth of blue pansy—I know somewhere I have seen it rain-shattered.

 

And I have seen a woman with her head flung between her naked knees, and her head held there listening to the sea, the great naked sea shouldering a load of salt.

 

And the blue pansy mouth sang to the sea:

Mother of God, I'm so little a thing,
Let me sing longer,
Only a little longer.

 

And the sea shouldered its salt in long gray combers hauling new shapes on the beach sand.

 

*

Bilbea

 

(From tablet writing, Babylonian excavations of 4th millennium b.c.)

Bilbea, I was in Babylon on Saturday night.
I saw nothing of you anywhere.

I was at the old place and the other girls were there, but no Bilbea.

 

Have you gone to another house? or city?

Why don’t you write?

I was sorry. I walked home half-sick.

 

Tell me how it goes.

Send me some kind of a letter.

And take care of yourself.

 

*

Portrait of a Motor Car

 

It’s a lean car . . . a long-legged dog of a car . . . a gray-ghost eagle car.

The feet of it eat the dirt of a road . . . the wings of it eat the hills.

Danny the driver dreams of it when he sees women in red skirts and red sox in his sleep.

It is in Danny's life and runs in the blood of him . . . a lean gray-ghost car.

 

*

Cool Tombs

 

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

 

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs.

 

Pocahontas’ body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember? . . . in the dust, in the cool tombs?

 

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns . . . tell me if the lovers are losers . . . tell me if any get more than the lovers . . . in the dust . . . in the cool tombs.

 

*

Galoots

 

Galoots, you hairy, hankering,

Snousle on the bones you eat, chew at the gristle and lick the last of it.

Grab off the bones in the paws of other galoots—hook your claws in their sleazy mouths—snap and run.

If long-necks sit on their rumps and sing wild cries to the winter moon, chasing their tails to the flickers of foolish stars . . . let ’em howl.

Galoots fat with too much, galoots lean with too little, galoot millions and millions, snousle and snicker on, plug your exhausts, hunt your snacks of fat and lean, grab off yours.

 

*

Manual System

 

Mary has a thingamajig clamped on her ears

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

Flashes and flashes—voices and voices

calling for ears to pour 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.

 

*

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.