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.
HAPPINESS I ASKED the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness. And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men. They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion. THE RIGHT TO GRIEF To Certain Poets About to Die TAKE your fill of intimate remorse, perfumed sorrow, Over the dead child of a millionaire, And the pity of Death refusing any check on the bank Which the millionaire might order his secretary to scratch off And get cashed. Very well, You for your grief and I for mine. Let me have a sorrow my own if I want to. I shall cry over the dead child of a stockyards hunky. His job is sweeping blood off the floor. He gets a dollar seventy cents a day when he works And it's many tubs of blood he shoves out with a broom day by day. Now his three year old daughter Is in a white coffin that cost him a week's wages. Every Saturday night he will pay the undertaker fifty cents till the debt is wiped out. The hunky and his wife and the kids Cry over the pinched face almost at peace in the white box. They remember it was scrawny and ran up high doctor bills. They are glad it is gone for the rest of the family now will have more to eat and wear. Yet before the majesty of Death they cry around the coffin And wipe their eyes with red bandanas and sob when the priest says, "God have mercy on us all."
I have a right to feel my throat choke about this. You take your grief and I mine--see? To-morrow there is no funeral and the hunky goes back to his job sweeping blood off the floor at a dollar seventy cents a day. All he does all day long is keep on shoving hog blood ahead of him with a broom. SKYSCRAPER BY day the skyscraper looms in the smoke and sun and has a soul. Prairie and valley, streets of the city, pour people into it and they mingle among its twenty floors and are poured out again back to the streets, prairies and valleys. It is the men and women, boys and girls so poured in and out all day that give the building a soul of dreams and thoughts and memories. (Dumped in the sea or fixed in a desert, who would care for the building or speak its name or ask a policeman the way to it?) Elevators slide on their cables and tubes catch letters and parcels and iron pipes carry gas and water in and sewage out. Wires climb with secrets, carry light and carry words, and tell terrors and profits and loves--curses of men grappling plans of business and questions of women in plots of love. Hour by hour the caissons reach down to the rock of the earth and hold the building to a turning planet. Hour by hour the girders play as ribs and reach out and hold together the stone walls and floors. Hour by hour the hand of the mason and the stuff of the mortar clinch the pieces and parts to the shape an architect voted. Hour by hour the sun and the rain, the air and the rust, and the press of time running into centuries, play on the building inside and out and use it. Men who sunk the pilings and mixed the mortar are laid in graves where the wind whistles a wild song without words And so are men who strung the wires and fixed the pipes and tubes and those who saw it rise floor by floor. Souls of them all are here, even the hod carrier begging at back doors hundreds of miles away and the brick-
layer who went to state's prison for shooting another man while drunk. (One man fell from a girder and broke his neck at the end of a straight plunge--he is here--his soul has gone into the stones of the building.) On the office doors from tier to tier--hundreds of names and each name standing for a face written across with a dead child, a passionate lover, a driving ambition for a million dollar business or a lobster's ease of life. Behind the signs on the doors they work and the walls tell nothing from room to room. Ten-dollar-a-week stenographers take letters from corporation officers, lawyers, efficiency engineers, and tons of letters go bundled from the building to all ends of the earth. Smiles and tears of each office girl go into the soul of the building just the same as the master-men who rule the building. Hands of clocks turn to noon hours and each floor empties its men and women who go away and eat and come back to work. Toward the end of the afternoon all work slackens and all jobs go slower as the people feel day closing on them. One by one the floors are emptied. . . The uniformed elevator men are gone. Pails clang. . . Scrubbers work, talking in foreign tongues. Broom and water and mop clean from the floors human dust and spit, and machine grime of the day. Spelled in electric fire on the roof are words telling miles of houses and people where to buy a thing for money. The sign speaks till midnight. Darkness on the hallways. Voices echo. Silence holds. . . Watchmen walk slow from floor to floor and try the doors. Revolvers bulge from their hip pockets. . . Steel safes stand in corners. Money is stacked in them. A young watchman leans at a window and sees the lights of barges butting their way across a harbor, nets of red and white lanterns in a railroad yard, and a span of glooms splashed with lines of white and blurs of crosses and clusters over the sleeping city. By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.
I AM THE PEOPLE, THE MOB I AM the people--the mob--the crowd--the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns. I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes me work and give up what I have. And I forget. Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then--I forget. When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, who played me for a fool--then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision. The mob--the crowd--the mass--will arrive then.
Paula by Carl Sandburg NOTHING else in this song-only your face. Nothing else here-only your drinking, night-gray eyes. The pier runs into the lake straight as a rifle barrel. I stand on the pier and sing how I know you mornings. It is not your eyes, your face, I remember. It is not your dancing, race-horse feet. It is something else I remember you for on the pier mornings. Your hands are sweeter than nut-brown bread when you touch me. Your shoulder brushes my arm-a south-west wind crosses the pier. I forget your hands and your shoulder and I say again: Nothing else in this song-only your face. Nothing else here-only your drinking, night-gray eyes.
For You THE PEACE of great doors be for you. Wait at the knobs, at the panel oblongs. Wait for the great hinges. The peace of great churches be for you, Where the players of loft pipe organs Practice old lovely fragments, alone.
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The peace of great books be for you, Stains of pressed clover leaves on pages, Bleach of the light of years held in leather. The peace of great prairies be for you. Listen among windplayers in cornfields, The wind learning over its oldest music The peace of great seas be for you. Wait on a hook of land, a rock footing For you, wait in the salt wash.
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The peace of great mountains be for you, The sleep and the eyesight of eagles, Sheet mist shadows and the long look across. The peace of great hearts be for you, Valves of the blood of the sun, Pumps of the strongest wants we cry.
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The peace of great silhouettes be for you, Shadow dancers alive in your blood now, Alive and crying, “Let us out, let us out.” The peace of great changes be for you. Whisper, Oh beginners in the hills. Tumble, Oh cubs—to-morrow belongs to you. The peace of great loves be for you. Rain, soak these roots; wind, shatter the dry rot. Bars of sunlight, grips of the earth, hug these.
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The peace of great ghosts be for you, Phantoms of night-gray eyes, ready to go To the fog-star dumps, to the fire-white doors. Yes, the peace of great phantoms be for you, Phantom iron men, mothers of bronze, Keepers of the lean clean breeds.
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Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry
1. Poetry is a projection across silence of cadences arranged to break that silence with definite intentions of echoes, syllables, wave lengths. 2. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language. 3. Poetry is the report of a nuance between two moments, when people say, ‘Listen!’ and ‘Did you see it?’ ‘Did you hear it? What was it?’ 4. Poetry is a tracing of the trajectories of a finite sound to the infinite points of its echoes. 5. Poetry is a sequence of dots and dashes, spelling depths, crypts, crosslights, and moon wisps. 6. Poetry is a puppet-show, where riders of skyrockets and divers of sea fathoms gossip about the sixth sense and the fourth dimension. 7. Poetry is a plan for a slit in the face of a bronze fountain goat and the path of fresh drinking water. 8. Poetry is a slipknot tightened around a time-beat of one thought, two thoughts, and a last interweaving thought there is not yet a number for. 9. Poetry is an echo asking a shadow dancer to be a partner. 10. Poetry is the journal of a sea animal living on land, wanting to fly the air. 11. Poetry is a series of explanations of life, fading off into horizons too swift for explanations. 12. Poetry is a fossil rock-print of a fin and a wing, with an illegible oath between. 13. Poetry is an exhibit of one pendulum connecting with other and unseen pendulums inside and outside the one seen. 14. Poetry is a sky dark with a wild-duck migration. 15. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. 16. Poetry is any page from a sketchbook of outlines of a doorknob with thumb-prints of dust, blood, dreams. 17. Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death. 18. Poetry is the cipher key to the five mystic wishes packed in a hollow silver bullet fed to a flying fish. 19. Poetry is a theorem of a yellow-silk handkerchief knotted with riddles, sealed in a balloon tied to the tail of a kite flying in a white wind against a blue sky in spring. 20. Poetry is a dance music measuring buck-and-wing follies along with the gravest and stateliest dead-marches. 21. Poetry is a sliver of the moon lost in the belly of a golden frog. 22. Poetry is a mock of a cry at finding a million dollars and a mock of a laugh at losing it. 23. Poetry is the silence and speech between a wet struggling root of a flower and a sunlit blossom of that flower. 24. Poetry is the harnessing of the paradox of earth cradling life and then entombing it. 25. Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment. 26. Poetry is a fresh morning spider-web telling a story of moonlit hours of weaving and waiting during a night. 27. Poetry is statement of a series of equations, with numbers and symbols changing like the changes of mirrors, pools, skies, the only never-changing sign being the sign of infinity. 28. Poetry is a packsack of invisible keepsakes. 29. Poetry is a section of river-fog and moving boat-lights, delivered between bridges and whistles, so one says, ‘Oh!’ and another, ‘How?’ 30. Poetry is a kinetic arrangement of static syllables. 31. Poetry is the arithmetic of the easiest way and the primrose path, matched up with foam-flanked horses, bloody knuckles, and bones, on the hard ways to the stars.
32. Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts. 33. Poetry is an enumeration of birds, bees, babies, butterflies, bugs, bambinos, babayagas, and bipeds, beating their way up bewildering bastions. 34. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away. 35. Poetry is the establishment of a metaphorical link between white butterfly-wings and the scraps of torn-up love-letters. 36. Poetry is the achievement of the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. 37. Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets. 38. Poetry is the capture of a picture, a song, or a flair, in a deliberate prism of words. Spring Wind Be flip with us if you want to, spring wind. Be gay and make us sniff at your slow secrets. Be easy with us, spring wind. Be lovely and yet be lovely not too fast with us. If a child came crying out of a snowstorm And sat down with secrets of new playthings, Crying because lovelier things than ever came that year– If a child came crying out of a sheet of ice, A white carving of a lithe running torso, Holding in its hands new baffling playthings– If a child came crying so, Wet and smiling, smelling of promises Of yellow roses blowing in the river backwashes, Potato blossoms across the prairie flat lands, And even so much as one new honest song to sing– If a child came so, We would say, ‘Come and sit on our back porch; Listen with us and tell us more, tell us all you know; Tell us the secrets of the spring wind; Tell us if this is a lucky year; Be lovely and yet be lovely not too fast with us.’ Timber Moon There is a way the moon looks into the timber at night And tells the walnut trees secrets of silver sand— There is a way the moon makes a lattice work Under the leaves of the hazel bushes— There is a way the moon understands the hoot owl Sitting on an arm of a sugar maple throwing its One long lonesome cry up the ladder of the moon— There is a way the moon finds company early in the falltime
Little Girls, Be Careful What You Say
Little girl, be careful what you say when you make talk with words, words— for words are made of syllables and syllables, child, are made of air— and air is so thin—air is the breath of God— air is finer than fire or mist, finer than water or moonlight, finer than spider-webs in the moon, finer than water-flowers in the morning: and words are strong, too, stronger than rocks or steel stronger than potatoes, corn, fish, cattle, and soft, too, soft as little pigeon eggs, soft as the music of hummingbird wings. So, little girl, when you speak greetings, when you tell jokes, make wishes or prayers, be careful, be careless, be careful, be what you wish to be. —Carl Sandburg, Wind Song Bubbles
Two bubbles found they had rainbows on their curves. The flickered out saying: "It was worth being a bubble, just to have held that rainbow thirty seconds." Lesson In early April the trees end their winter waiting with a creep of green on branches. In early October the trees listen for a wind crying, for leaves whirling. The face of the river by night holds a scatter of stars and the silence of summer blossoms falling to the moving water. Come clean with a child heart. Laugh as peaches in the summer wind. Let rain on a house roof be a song. Let the writing on your face be a smell of apple orchards in late June.