Poems by Carl Sandburg

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Sixteen Months

On the lips of the child Janet float changing dreams.

It is a thin spiral of blue smoke,

A morning campfire at a mountain lake.

On the lips of the child Janet,

Wisps of haze on ten miles of corn,

Young light blue calls to young light gold of morning.

Carl Sandburg

Horses And Men In Rain

Let us sit by a hissing steam radiator a winter's day, gray wind pattering frozen raindrops on the window,

And let us talk about milk wagon drivers and grocery delivery boys.

Let us keep our feet in wool slippers and mix hot punches—and talk about mail carriers and

messenger boys slipping along the icy sidewalks.

Let us write of olden, golden days and hunters of the

Holy Grail and men called "knights" riding horses in the rain, in the cold frozen rain for ladies they loved.

A roustabout hunched on a coal wagon goes by, icicles drip on his hat rim, sheets of ice wrapping

the hunks of coal, the caravanserai a gray blur in slant of rain.

Carl Sandburg

North Atlantic

WHEN the sea is everywhere

from horizon to horizon ..

when the salt and blue

fill a circle of horizons ..

I swear again how I know

the sea is older than anything else

and the sea younger than anything else.

Carl Sandburg

The Year

A storm of white petals,

Buds throwing open baby fists

Into hands of broad flowers.

Red roses running upward,

Clambering to the clutches of life

Soaked in crimson.

Carl Sandburg

Bricklayer Love

I thought of killing myself because I am only a bricklayer

and you a woman who loves the man who runs a drug store.

I don't care like I used to; I lay bricks straighter than I

used to and I sing slower handling the trowel afternoons.

When the sun is in my eyes and the ladders are shaky and the

mortar boards go wrong, I think of you.

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.