WORKING GIRLS

The working girls in the morning are going to work—

long lines of them afoot amid the downtown stores

and factories, thousands with little brick-shaped

lunches wrapped in newspapers under their arms.

Each morning as I move through this river of young-

woman life I feel a wonder about where it is all

going, so many with a peach bloom of young years

on them and laughter of red lips and memories in

their eyes of dances the night before and plays and

walks.

Green and gray streams run side by side in a river and

so here are always the others, those who have been

over the way, the women who know each one the

end of life’s gamble for her, the meaning and the

clew, the how and the why of the dances and the

arms that passed around their waists and the fingers

that played in their hair.

Faces go by written over: “I know it all, I know where

the bloom and the laughter go and I have memories,”

and the feet of these move slower and they

have wisdom where the others have beauty.

So the green and the gray move in the early morning

on the downtown streets.

—Carl Sandburg, Chicago Poems