Poems by Carl Sandburg

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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 good-by.

Let the stars and songs go.

Let the faces and years go.

Carl Sandburg

Government

THE Government—I heard about the Government and

I went out to find it. I said I would look closely at

it when I saw it.

Then I saw a policeman dragging a drunken man to

the callaboose. It was the Government in action.

I saw a ward alderman slip into an office one morning

and talk with a judge. Later in the day the judge

dismissed a case against a pickpocket who was a

Carl Sandburg

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,

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

Carl Sandburg

They Will Say

OF my city the worst that men will ever say is this:

You took little children away from the sun and the dew,

And the glimmers that played in the grass under the great sky,

And the reckless rain; you put them between walls

To work, broken and smothered, for bread and wages,

To eat dust in their throats and die empty-hearted

For a little handful of pay on a few Saturday nights.

Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the first publication date.The lyrical form of this poem is unrhyming.3.glimmers: little ones.

Carl Sandburg

Murmurings In A Field Hospital

[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two

days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.]

Come to me only with playthings now. . .

A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes

Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers. . .

Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories

Of days that never happened anywhere in the world. . .

No more iron cold and real to handle,

Carl Sandburg

Sea Slant

On up the sea slant,

On up the horizon,

The ship limps.

The bone of her nose fog-gray,

The heart of her sea-strong,

She came a long way,

She goes a long way.

On up the sea slant,

Carl Sandburg

Languages

THERE are no handles upon a language

Whereby men take hold of it

And mark it with signs for its remembrance.

It is a river, this language,

Once in a thousand years

Breaking a new course

Changing its way to the ocean.

It is mountain effluvia

Carl Sandburg

An Electric Sign Goes Dark

Poland, France, Judea ran in her veins,

Singing to Paris for bread, singing to Gotham in a fizz at the pop of a bottle’s cork.

“Won’t you come and play wiz me” she sang … and “I just can’t make my eyes behave.”

“Higgeldy-Piggeldy,” “Papa’s Wife,” “Follow Me” were plays.

Did she wash her feet in a tub of milk? Was a strand of pearls sneaked from her trunk? The newspapers asked.

Cigarettes, tulips, pacing horses, took her name.

Carl Sandburg

A Tall Man

The mouth of this man is a gaunt strong mouth.

The head of this man is a gaunt strong head.

The jaws of this man are bone of the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachians.

The eyes of this man are chlorine of two sobbing oceans,

Foam, salt, green, wind, the changing unknown.

The neck of this man is pith of buffalo prairie, old longing and new beckoning of corn belt or cotton belt,

Either a proud Sequoia trunk of the wilderness

Carl Sandburg

Aztec Mask

I wanted a man's face looking into the jaws and throat

of life

With something proud on his face, so proud no smash

of the jaws,

No gulp of the throat leaves the face in the end

With anything else than the old proud look:

Even to the finish, dumped in the dust,

Lost among the used-up cinders,

Carl Sandburg

Autumn Movement

I cried over beautiful things knowing no beautiful thing lasts.

The field of cornflower yellow is a scarf at the neck of the copper sunburned woman, the mother of the year, the taker of seeds.

The northwest wind comes and the yellow is torn full of holes, new beautiful things come in the first spit of snow on the northwest wind, and the old things go, not one lasts.

Carl Sandburg