Carl Sandburg

Only old songs? Is that all the sea knows?Only the old strong songs?Is that all?The sea-wash repeats, repeats.

Cliffs challenge humped; sudden arcs form on a gull’s wing in the storm’s vortex; miles of white horses plow through a stony beach; stars, clear sky, and everywhere free climbers calling; and a woman’s steel face … looking … looking …

At seven o’clock in the morningOn a Halsted street car.Take your pencilsAnd draw these faces.Try with your pencils for these crooked faces,That pig-sticker in one corner—his mouth—That overall factory girl—her loose cheeks.Find for your pencilsA way to mark your memoryOf tired empty faces.After their night’s sleep,In the moist dawnAnd cool daybreak,FacesTired of wishes,Empty of dreams.

I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at eveninginto points of mystery quivering with color.I answered:The whole world was mist once long ago and some dayit will all go back to mist,Our skulls and lungs…

Hurtling across the prairie into blue haze and dark airgo fifteen all-steel coaches holding a thousand people.(All the coaches shall be scrap and rust and all the menand women laughing in the diners and sleepers shallpass to ashes.)I ask a man in the smoker where he is going and heanswers: ‘Omaha.’

spell it with red wheels and yellow spokes.They fizz in the air, touch the water and quit.Rockets make a trajectory of gold-and-blueand then go out.Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar.Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to razorback hill.It is easy to…

Everybody loved her.So we all love a wild girl keeping a holdOn a dream she wants.Nobody knows now where Chick Lorimer went.Nobody knows why she packed her trunk .. a few old thingsAnd is gone,Gone with her little chinThrust ahead of herAnd her soft hair blowing carelessFrom under a wide hat,Dancer, singer, a laughing passionate…

Partners in the mist.Lunging buffalo shoulder,Lean Indian face,We who come after where you are goneSalute your forms on the new nickel.You areTo us:The past.RunnersOn the prairie:Good-by.

SELL me a violin, mister, of old mysterious wood.Sell me a fiddle that has kissed dark nights on the forehead where men kiss sisters they love.Sell me dried wood that has ached with passion clutching the knees and arms of a storm.Sell me horsehair and rosin that has sucked at the breasts of the morning…

put out pointing fingers here,picked this crossway, put it on a map,set up their sawbucks, fixed their shotguns,found a hitching place for the pony express,made a hitching place for the iron horse,the one-eyed horse with the fire-spit head,found a homelike spot and said, ‘Make a home,’saw this corner with a mesh of rails, shuttlingpeople, shunting…