Women of night life amid the lights Where the line of your full, round throats Matches in gleam the glint of your eyes And the ring of your heart-deep laughter : It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
Women of night life along the shadows, Lean at your throats and skulking the walls. Gaunt as a bitch worn to the bone, Under the paint of your smiling faces : It is much to be warm and sure of to-morrow.
In the Shenandoah Valley, one rider gray and one rider blue, and the sun on the riders wondering.
Piled in the Shenandoah, riders blue and riders gray, piled with shovels, one and another, dust in the Shenandoah taking them quicker than mothers take children done with play.
The blue nobody remembers, the gray nobody remembers, it's all old and old nowadays in the Shenandoah.
And all is young, a butter of dandelions slung on the turf, climbing blue flowers of the wishing woodlands wondering: a midnight purple violet claims the sun among old heads, among old dreams of repeating heads of a rider blue and a rider gray in the Shenandoah.
The dancing girls here . . . after a long night of it ... The long beautiful night of the wind and rain in April, The long night hanging down from the drooping branches of the top of a birch tree, Swinging, swaying, to the wind for a partner, to the rain for a partner. What is the humming, swishing thing they sing in the morning now? The rain, the wind, the swishing whispers of the long slim curve so little and so dark on the western morning sky . . . these dancing girls here on an April early morning . . . They have had a long cool beautiful night of it with their partners learning this year's song of April.
What does the hangman think about When he goes home at night from work? When he sits down with his wife and Children for a cup of coffee and a Plate of ham and eggs, do they ask Him if it was a good day's work And everything went well or do they Stay off some topics and talk about The weather, base ball, politics And the comic strips in the papers And the movies? Do they look at his Hands when he reaches for the coffee Or the ham and eggs? If the little Ones say, Daddy, play horse, here's A rope — does he answer like a joke: I seen enough rope for today? Or does his face light up like a Bonfire of joy and does he say: It's a good and dandy world we live In. And if a white face moon looks In through a window where a baby girl Sleeps and the moon gleams mix with Baby ears and baby hair — the hangman — How does he act then? It must be easy For him. Anything is easy for a hangman, I guess.
Many ways to spell good night. Fireworks at a pier on the Fourth of July 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-blue and then go out. Railroad trains at night spell with a smokestack mushrooming a white pillar. Steamboats turn a curve in the Mississippi crying in a baritone that crosses lowland cottonfields to a razorback hill. It is easy to spell good night. Many ways to spell good night.
The shadows of the ships Rock on the crest In the low blue lustre Of the tardy and the soft inrolling tide. A long brown bar at the dip of the sky Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt.
The lucid and endless wrinkles Draw in, lapse and withdraw. Wavelets crumble and white spent bubbles Wash on the floor of the beach.
Rocking on the crest In the low blue lustre Are the shadows of the ships.
Legs hold a torso away from the earth. And a regular high poem of legs is here. Powers of bone and cord raise a belly and lungs Out of ooze and over the loam where eyes look and ears hear And arms have a chance to hammer and shoot and run motors. You make us Proud of our legs, old man. And you left off the head here, The skull found always crumbling neighbor of the ankles.
Shaken, The blossoms of lilac, And shattered, The atoms of purple. Green dip the leaves. Darker the bark. Longer the shadows. Sheer lines of poplar Shimmer with masses of silver And down in a garden old with years And broken walls of ruin and story, Roses rise with red rain-memories.
May! In the open world The sun comes and finds your face, Remembering all.
Carl Sandburg was an American poet, biographer, and journalist who lived from 1878 to 1967. He is associated with the Chicago literary renaissance and wrote primarily in free verse. His poems often use Midwestern vernacular and imagery drawn from industry, agriculture, and urban life. His poetry frequently focuses on common people, including workers, immigrants, and the poor. His early collections, such as "Chicago Poems" (1916) and "Cornhuskers" (1918), established his reputation for direct, colloquial language. Later collections like "Smoke and Steel" (1920) and "The People, Yes" (1936) continued his treatment of democratic themes and folk speech. Sandburg also wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln in two parts, "Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years" (1926) and "Abraham Lincoln: The War Years" (1939); the latter received a Pulitzer Prize. He published "The American Songbag" (1927), a collection of American folk songs, and wrote children's stories such as the "Rootabaga" tales. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1951 for "Complete Poems." Sandburg is a central figure in twentieth-century American poetry, known for bringing vernacular speech into the literary mainstream.
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