Carl Sandburg Poems

Little one, you have been buzzing in the books,
Flittering in the newspapers and drinking beer with lawyers
And amid the educated men of the clubs you have been getting an earful of speech from trained tongues.
Take an earful from me once, go with me on a hike
...

speak, sir, and be wise.
Speak choosing your words, sir, like an old woman over a bushel of apples.
...

The Balloons hang on wires in the Marigold Gardens.
They spot their yellow and gold, they juggle their blue and
...

There is something terrible
about a hurdy-gurdy,
a gipsy man and woman,
and a monkey in red flannel
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Baby vamps, is it harder work than it used to be?
Are the new soda parlors worse than the old time saloons?
...

Band concert public square Nebraska city. Flowing and circling dresses, summer-white dresses. Faces, flesh tints
...

Seven days all fog, all mist, and the turbines pounding through high seas.
I was a plaything, a rat’s neck in the teeth of a scuffling mastiff.
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Have I broken the smaller tabernacles, O Lord?
And in the destruction of these set up the greater and massive, the everlasting tabernacles?
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I am an ancient reluctant conscript.

On the soup wagons of Xerxes I was a cleaner of pans.
On the march of Miltiades' phalanx I had a haft and head;
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THE BOY Alexander understands his father to be a famous lawyer.
The leather law books of Alexander's father fill a room like hay in a barn.
Alexander has asked his father to let him build a house like bricklayers build, a house with walls and roofs made of big leather law books.
...