Carl Sandburg

TWO Swede families live downstairs and an Irish policeman upstairs, and an old soldier, Uncle Joe.

The boys and Uncle Joe crack walnuts with a hammer on the bottom of a flatiron while the January wind howls and the zero air weaves laces on the window glass.Joe tells the Swede boys all about Chickamauga and Chattanooga, how the Union soldiers crept in rain somewhere a dark night and ran forward and…

THIS handful of grass, brown, says little. This quarter mile field of it, waving seeds ripening in the sun, is a lake of luminous firefly lavender.

These gardens empty; these fields only flower ghosts; these yards with faces gone; leaves speaking as feet and skirts in slow dances to slow winds; I turn my head and say good-by to no one who hears; I pronounce a useless good-by.

All the policemen, saloonkeepers and efficiency experts in Toledo

Pickpockets, yeggs, three card men, he knew them all and how they flitfrom zone to zone, birds of wind and weather, singers, fighters,scavengers.The Washington monument pointed to a new moon for usand a gang from over the river sang ragtime to a ukelele.The river mist marched up and down the Potomac, we huntedthe fog-swept Lincoln…

OUT of the testimony of such reluctant lips, out of the oaths and mouths of such scrupulous liars, out of perjurers whose hands swore by God to the white sun before all men,

From such a rag that has wiped the secret sores of kings and overlords across the milleniums of human marches and babblings,From such a rag perhaps I shall wring one reluctant desperate drop of blood, one honest-to-God spot of red speaking a mother-heart.December, 1918.Christiania, Norway