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Carl Sandburg (1878–1967)
Chicago Poems
New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1916

CHICAGO POEMS

SUBWAY

Down between the walls of shadow
Where the iron laws insist,
The hunger voices mock.

The worn wayfaring men
With the hunched and humble shoulders,
Throw their laughter into toil.

 

IN A BACK ALLEY

Remembrance for a great man is this.
The newsies are pitching pennies.
And on the copper disk is the man's face.
Dead lover of boys, what do you ask for now?

 

HANDFULS

FOG

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.

 

POOL

Out of the fire
Came a man sunken
To less than cinders,
A tea-cup of ashes or so.
And I,
The gold in the house,
Writhed into a stiff pool.

 

CHOOSE

The single clenched fist lifted and ready,
Or the open asking hand held out and waiting.
Choose:
For we meet by one or the other.

 

WHITELIGHT

Your whitelight flashes the frost to-night
Moon of the purple and silent west.
Remember me one of your lovers of dreams.

 

FLUX

Sand of the sea runs red
Where the sunset reaches and quivers.
Sand of the sea runs yellow
Where the moon slants and wavers.

 

WHITE SHOULDERS

Your white shoulders
I remember
And your shrug of laughter.

Low laughter
Shaken slow
From your white shoulders.

 

LOSSES

I have love
And a child,
A banjo
And shadows.
(Losses of God,
All will go
And one day
We will hold
Only the shadows.)

 

TROTHS

Yellow dust on a bumble
bee's wing,
Grey lights in a woman's
asking eyes,
Red ruins in the changing
sunset embers:
I take you and pile high
the memories.
Death will break her claws
on some I keep.

 

THE ROAD AND THE END

UNDER

I
I am the undertow
Washing tides of power
Battering the pillars
Under your things of high law.

II
I am a sleepless
Slowfaring eater,
Maker of rust and rot
In your bastioned fastenings,
Caissons deep.

III
I am the Law
Older than you
And your builders proud.

I am deaf
In all days
Whether you
Say "Yes" or "No".

I am the crumbler:
To-morrow.

FOGS AND FIRES

MONOTONE

The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.

The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.

A face I know is beautiful--
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain.

 

TWO

Memory of you is . . . a blue spear of flower.
I cannot remember the name of it.
Alongside a bold dripping poppy is fire and silk.
And they cover you.

 

I SANG

I sang to you and the moon
But only the moon remembers.
I sang
O reckless free-hearted
free-throated rythms,
Even the moon remembers them
And is kind to me.

 

JUNE

Paula is digging and shaping the loam of a salvia,
Scarlet Chinese talker of summer.
Two petals of crabapple blossom blow fallen in Paula's
hair,
And fluff of white from a cottonwood.

 

HYDRANGEAS

Dragoons, I tell you the white hydrangeas
turn rust and go soon.
Already mid September a line of brown runs
over them.
One sunset after another tracks the faces, the
petals.
Waiting, they look over the fence for what
way they go.

 

WINDOW

Night from a railroad car window
Is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.

OTHER DAYS (1900-1910)

UPLANDS IN MAY

Wonder as of old things
Fresh and fair come back
Hangs over pasture and road.
Lush in the lowland grasses rise
And upland beckons to upland.
The great strong hills are humble.

"Insofar as one can find a likeness to Japanese poetics in Sandburg’s verse it is in the Chicago Poems, a few of which are brief, unrhymed, and culminate in a sharp visual image. Those most ‘like’ haiku had been published first in Poetry in 1914, the year after Pound’s ‘Imagisme’, ‘A Few Don’ts for an Imagiste’, and IN A STATION OF THE METRO had appeared in that journal. The search for Sandburg’s sources for his ‘haiku-like’ poems, then, most profitably begins, and ends, in those and related works."
David Ewick, 'Carl Sandburg', Bibliography of Japan in English-Language Verse, http://themargins.net/bib/C/ca/ca06.html